skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Status for one and pay and benefits for another.

Engineers (And I mean real ones) have enough trouble with people thinking they are blue colar craft workers.
And you can submit your own links to libraries or stuff you've built :)
I use this concept but with a human: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

I'm also someone's 'duck', we have an agreement we will listen to each other's problems for the purpose of the problem-holder finding the solution during the explanation. We use the word 'duck' specifically so we know what's going to happen in the next few sentences, rather than me put on my 'let me solve this for you' hat.
This looks like the basis for an extremely cool Minecraft mod.
One of their suggestions is to have a follower of your DB and fall back to it. When they put the API in read-only mode, would I have been able to promote any followers?
Absolutely. I've found that's my litmus test for defining whether a patent is valid or not: "are you making money from developing this idea?". If the author isn't pursuing the product, then he's just defining a general idea and letting others actually work out the details.

Just think about that: the people who would actually do the work and get the product out are preempted by someone who is just sitting on his arse. How is that encouraging innovation?
Great modern defense of penny-wise and pound-foolish.

The challenge is automation and commodification pushes us towards the lowest common denominator. Look at airlines, being forced into price, not quality.
"There are a variety of measures that could be taken to alleviate the problems I've described. They include: reducing the patent term for inventors in industries that do not have the peculiar characteristics of pharmaceuticals that I described; ..."

To me the obvious solution, and the one missing from this list, is to abolish patents altogether in such industries ( including the tech industry). I wonder if judge Posner would agree, and if so, why not come out and say it? Would this be considered too radical at this point in time?
And it keeps happening. Everyone knows just a subset of Vim, and everyone knows a different subset. Watching another person use it, you'll ask them how they did something. And they'll have to do it again, watching the keyboard, because they don't know the keys that they hit. It has entered their muscle memory.
My favorite ideas in the Go ecosystem - a usability perspective
I've never seen anyone using vim... maybe that's why I haven't had the guts to switch yet.
I really like how you guys built a viral mechanism into the product. You incentivize the user to share their BrandYourself with their existing profiles/networks to receive a "boost", which helps spread word of your product. Pretty ingenious if you ask me. Good job guys!
Congratulations, but there's no way to say who a "user" is in 60 hours. What you got was 60k signups in 60 hours.
A bit off-topic, but I really don't think that LibreOffice is a good alternative for MS Office. Every single time I try to do something in LibreOffice I find out that it's missing some incredibly basic feature that I need. Last time it was rotating images in Writer: I had to edit the image in another app.

MS products get a lot of hate but I think that Office (at least the newest verions) really has nailed it. Shame it's not on Linux.
Or maybe that's why there are so many divorces!
Convert Dates Between Ruby and Javascript
Dear United States of America,

Please stop trying to impose your ridiculous and restrictive policies and law on us. There a simple reason we don't have the same legislation you do: WE DON'T WANT IT.

Sincerely,
The rest of the world
There is one problem with the "find who is googling you" feature. For about a year now, google has started hiding the search results from the referral when someone uses google while logged in to google services.

You may have seen "not provided" in google analytics for searches that found your site... This is users logged in to google. And with more people using google services such as gmail and g+, more and more results will be hidden. On my corporate, tech web site, I'm seeing 40-50% of results from google as "not provided" nowadays, and its increasing every month.
I agree with most of the ideas in this article with the small exception of the example he gives for services and hiring "the best firm in the country." I think you're mostly paying for overhead and bloat in those cases, and I would prefer to work with "the guy down the street" if I can (in which case I'd want to find the best "guy down the street," regardless of cost).

Other than that, it amazes me how people won't spend for quality in situations where it clearly is in their best interest for the long-term...
I guess I'm just incompetent then =) Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out when I get a chance.
Everybody in the Finnish software business knows that much of the public procurement happens over various "old boys club" arrangements, and "surprisingly" usually ends in the hands of the same two or three big IT providers.

Finland used to be regarded as one of the least corrupted countries, but that has crumbled as more and more of these situations surface.

No wonder they want to keep their costs secret.
In that particular case I strongly suspect that if you polled white Democrats in those states you'd get similar answers on the interracial marriage question.

Probably not similar on the "Is Obama secretly a Muslim?" question, but as Democrats they're less likely to believe negative things about their party head.

My point is that there are many, many racist Democrats in the country, and if you don't think so you just haven't gotten around very much.
> But nowadays, if you are racist, you’re probably a Republican.

For definitions of "racist" that are "interesting" to say the least.

> Bill Maher put it best.

Maher is a tool who makes Limbaugh look smart.
Stealing Documents Through Social Media Image-Sharing
I was under the impression that key disclosure laws are present in many countries.

Even in the US, with amendments against self-incrimination, if the authorities already know you have encrypted some incriminating data, you can be ordered to hand over the key.

In the Colorado case, the police had intercepted a
telephone conversation in which the defendant, Ramona F.,
acknowledged her ownership of the laptop and alluded to
the existence of incriminating documents in the encrypted
portions of the hard drive.

...

I conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by
requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the
Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#Legislation_...

Though you are right that the law in the UK seems very strict. As an international banker I would be weary bringing a master key or encrypted volume into the UK.
> Many people have no windows hosts, but do have existing xen/kvm dom0s running. If grid spot provided their service as a xen/kvm client image I would be able to host it.

They should provide their image instead of the binary. Theirs, rather than their clients. Got you know!

But I don’t think their audience will have much use for it. Well it’s unlikely to be a priority, anyway.

> Don't get suckered in to providing 1:1 IPv4 with your proxy model.

BTW, he doesn’t. It’s all proxied through single IP on different ports. E.g. this is what I got:

ssh gridspot_user@69.4.239.76 -p 25502
It'll get more complicated later I'm sure, but yeah, that's the current patch. Except replace "dissertation on kittens" with "gay porn collection" (or "straight porn collection" if you're publicly gay. or whatever else makes good sense to encrypt, but is still perfectly legal).
Apple iPhone 5 release: Pre-Order Starts in China
Above the headline is an ad for the Samsung Galaxy S III which speaks volumes about where we are: Microsoft should have created the Android market, and it may be too late for them to catch up. Can you imagine DEC declaring in the early 80s that we were in the Mainframe+ era?
Thanks for the information. I admit I'm not fully versed. I don't know much about enterprise OSS, but I do know that IBM created Eclipse as a way to get people onto their development tools and Java technology. Not to say that's even a bad thing
(although I'm no fan of Eclipse but thats irrelevant), just that I guess I don't want to see things like Github motivated by money, when its worked so damn well without it.

What I don't want to see is programmers begging for "donations" so they can work on their project. Clearly my example was a little overblown, but if its not broken why fix it?

Thanks for the info though - as I'm sure I'm not the only one that learned from it.
“A diploma is worth actual money, whereas an education is not.”

Don't developing countries grow up so fast these days.
It's taken a century of cynicism for most American colleges to recognize this and the Chinese have reached the point in only a few years.
Yes! Negative points for expressing an opinion! Now I understand the group mentality of HN.
Move to open sky for Skylon spaceplane
The other aspect of this is that a Mississippi Democrat is different from a Massachusetts Democrat.
In that case, let me point to my SO answer where I share a videos of a Vim guy in action.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1088387/what-specific-pro...
Something something nail in the coffin.
> Even if they discover higgs boson, is there any chance for standard model to be changed again later on?

Yes.

No matter what they discover that is consistent with the standard model, there's always a chance that a later discovery will invalidate the standard model.

One difference between science and math is that you can prove things correct in math. In science, you can only prove things incorrect.
How to get the truth from VCs
That is in practice the intention, though as it is a law on the book's it is open to be abused down the line against non-terroists.

As a rule the UK police tend to have alot of common sence, but they are also human. That all said the whole blackberry encryption affair recently arising due to the riots does highlight further shortcommings.

Still this law was instigated prior to 9/11 and in that you do wonder what it would look like if it was instigated after the event and how it may of looked.
Yeah, that's an excellent point. Everything takes time, and time is your single most important commodity as a solo-founder.

Do I push out a new fix that stops some bugs, upgrade a feature that customers have been haranguing me about, do some marketing to get new customers or work on support so I can devote more time to <everything else> in the future?

As with most things in startup land, it's all about compromise, which I'm sure you already know =) Loved the post btw, looking forward to more posts coming from you
I believe, as my opinion, that cable is for morons. My wife however watches cable. See where I'm going with this?
Yes, but the chances of proving such nebulous ideas change greatly if you can be demonized in the public eye.
I think this question assumes a premise that many of the people that use PHP would not agree with. For that reason, the responses you get may be biased.

I am a part time developer that uses PHP, and there are a number of reasons I haven't moved off it for back end work. The first is that although it seems to be the target of dislike from those working on the bleeding edge, it is as popular as it is for good reasons. It has flaws, sure, but it is loads better than it was a few years ago, and it will continue to improve.

There are usually two ways that people change something. The first is being 'pushed' - something being so bad you seek out a replacement, the second being 'pulled' - seeing something so compelling in another product you have to switch. PHP isn't something that will push you away from it, I believe those switching are being pulled to other languages because of whatever nifty features they provide. In cases where you are working in established development environments on established projects, the switching costs are rarely justified for the marginal improvements.

I use PHP because it does everything I want it to, and its what I know. Familiarity has a huge advantage and to sacrifice short term productivity for possible long term gain is something that is easy to put off. Another thing that I love about PHP is its ubiquity and how easy it is to get in to start writing with it.

Fairly recently, I did seriously consider making the switch and giving two other languages a month each to see how they worked for me. What actually stopped me from doing this is that around the same time a lot of my work changed from server-side to client-side programming. My back end programming in my recent projects acts more like a simple interface between my client software and database than anything else, so I have been doing very little of it.

I have a few questions in response, and I ask these as someone genuinely curious.

How big do you think the gain is between working in PHP and working in <other language>?
What do you think that other languages may be lacking that PHP doesn't that may make people not want to move?
You're missing the point!

They don't need to filter the audio files themselves, that's completely un-needed, all they need to do is filter the meta data (eg: artist name, song title, album name). That is not hard. If you have a list of artists with their songs and albums you could easily match the submitted data against this and work out if the submission is disallowed. If they upload with "fake" meta data (eg: fake artist name) it doesn't matter because no user is going to find that music.
Very interesting product. I haven't yet had a chance to fully explore the site, but I will certainly be creating an account in the future.

I have two concerns:

1) What happens when two people with the same name sign up? Couldn't that lead to issues where they're both trying to promote their own stuff while burying the others?

2) Is there any way that someone could pose as someone they're not in order to sabotage that persons google results, or I could see the possibility of a friend doing that in order to pull a prank on you?

As I said I haven't fully explored to site, so if these concerns are addressed on there, apologies. Great article!
LOL it's funny because of the color of my skin!
> It isn't hard to imagine the police assuming any file they don't understand is that way because it is encrypted

True, but they have to prove they have reasonable grounds for believing, not just that it's encrypted, but also that you have the key to it.

> "I have no clue" is not going to cause reasonable doubt

It doesn't need to cause reasonable doubt, it just has to raise an issue about whether or not you have they key. In which case the police have to prove you do beyond reasonable doubt.

But you are right - it is ambiguous, and that evidential presumption is in danger of being interpreted in a very anti-defendant way.

But:

> I have lost faith in any chance of governments sticking to reasonableness

Thankfully, it's not up to the government to interpret legislation, it's up to the courts. And they have to interpret criminal legislation (a) in favour of the defendant (common law principle), and (b) compatibly with the human rights act.

That second one is powerful, and has resulted in anti-defendant statues being interpreted almost out of all recognition by a court happy to interpret stuff compatibly with the HRA right to a fair trial. See e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/may/18/lords.politics .
Hartli - a Web Design analysing Robot
One way I can think of that is not surprising would be they dumped LibreOffice on users with no training. That generated a huge uptick in support calls and therefore costs.

A lot of migration projects seem set up to fail, the quickest way to do that is make the users unhappy and site increased support costs.
That comic is misleading. Depending on the method of attack, the suggested password can be easier to crack. Attackers aren't constricted by the number of characters, but by the number of tokens. Are you sure that one of those passwords comes from a higher number of permutations?
I remember my grandmother telling us how first the bus and then the family car let her shop where she wanted to. Stores adapted. Face it, lack of transportation will allow bad service to exist simply because the customers are trapped.

When your the only game in town, well.

So I don't buy the dire predictions.
Thanks. The trick is to figure out how a viral mechanism that aligns with your actual value prop. People want their links to show up higher in google, and sharing them on social networks will actually help in that process. It fits :)
Anyone else notice that the acronym for Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers (SOCAN), should actually be SOCAMP? Guess they felt that was inappropriate.
Going to be blunt. We can't keep this up every time a new bill appears. At some point, we are going to get exhausted and he will win. I think it is us who haven't learned anything. Instead of getting upset, we should be focused on funding his opponent and getting him out of office. He is going to do what he is going to do because his electorate is okay with it.

UPVOTE this if you believe in changing things or DON't if you want to whine.
Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out?
It's pokemans, the Q is silent

Joke, about the lego engine what can I say? it's very cool but it pales in comparison to the bleak situation of engineers in other industries.

It's like the old man in Primer said: You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty? They take them out and shoot them.
Well, most people with old VHS tapes have several GB of noise lying around.
This sounds very 1984. If the police says you have encrypted data, how can they prove it really is encrypted data? Besides, how can they prove that you do have the keys for the hypothetical encrypted data?

It sounds absurd that you have to prove your innocence. It is common principle that who accuses is responsible for proving your guilty. Besides, even in the remote situation where they could prove somehow that a pile of random bits held some confidential data, no one should be acused of not deciphering it to provide proof against himself. It sounds like inquisition :) If you deny having a deal with the devil you die, and if you confess it, you die too.
You might want to take the quote from Fox news off your front page. First thing I noticed...
Silver's antibacterial properties: it's all in the ions
Remember this one when the Darwin Award nominations come around.
I think this is rather amazing. And kudos to the creators, but I cant help but feel that the "Create a site based on this design" is a little on the ethically grey side. Essentially saying copy this persons design and charge me for it. That being said it does seem to (using the Machine-Learning / analysis) err on the side of being less evil more clever.
American Teachers Launch Cross Country Tour to Build Perfect School
Still ugly, but at least it won't crap out if your data has duplicate values:

$copy = array_map( function($v) { return $v; }, $original );
> UPVOTE this if you believe in changing things or DON't if you want to whine.

Kindly leave that crap on Facebook.
You have a choice not to use facebook, I suppose. I can't see a single complaint against this system that doesn't end in bullshitting someone else (i.e. deception). Someone sends you a message, you read it, don't act on it. Now the other person can see you didn't act and ask WTF.

It'll cause some friction, sure. People will get over it.
Let's think about something for second: The MPAA was originally started way back when in response to threats from Washington about wanting to regulate motion picture content.

The intent of the MPAA film ratings system is to be self-policing on the industry the group lobbies for. Obviously time and modernity has seen their raison d'être evolve into something even more self-interested and defensive than for visible public benefit, but why can't Google, Wikipedia et al do something similar?

I'm thinking of like campaigns designed to educate people about not just CC, GPL, but all kinds of copyright, attribution norms, and what not.

And yeah, Google and the rest should probably include some stuff that is just obviously flagrant piracy in things like Panda updates, filtering mechanisms, etc without being asked. (gasp, horror of horrors, I know)

They should NEVER be forced to, but they should be proactive about it, show that they are, and like the MPAA did once upon a time show Washington, Hollywood, and the rights holders they can police themselves fine without Government intervention.

Smith can go away tomorrow. The IP lobby is not. These people are embedded into the U.S. DOJ and elsewhere. It's not going to stop.

*edits for punctuation, line breaks
I used to be like Richard Posner, where I was generally against patents except for a few cases like pharmaceutical. Until I read Against Intellectual Monopoly. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstne...

See chapter 9 for an historical analysis of the pharmaceutical industry in countries without patents. The surprising result is companies no-patent protection countries were producing equivalent new drugs as the patent protected companies.

Now I am full anti-IP advocate, except for certain trademarks and attribution of authorship (so people know who the company/author this product came from).
How a Couple Lives in a 240-square-foot Apartment
How Crocodoc (YC W10) infiltrated Yammer, Dropbox, LinkedIn & more
I do as well. And I actually look through my bank records to make a reasonable estimate of how much I've bought online to get the number as good as I can without having to actually track everything all year.
Dear America, Have you had enough of your Government yet?
My Senior Design Project: Node.js WiFi-Extending Robot
> Object Oriented (most work is done by objects)

Objects don't do work - methods do. Objects organize state.

Methods are functions with implicit state that may be shared with other methods. These functions may be functional (as in Actors) or imperative.

Objects help organize state.

You can "OOP" in any language; it doesn't actually require any language-level constructs. (Yup, you can do OOP in assembly language, Fortran 66, etc.)
The most common pepper algorithm I've seen is doing e.g. "bcrypt(hmac_sha512(password, pepper), salt)" instead of "bcrypt(password, salt)". This has a number of advantages over working the pepper into the hash itself:

1) this wrapper can be applied to any hash scheme, regardless of it's internal structure or options.

2) it doesn't expose the pepper within the hash string.

3) brute-forcing the hash w/o the pepper means you're searching for the 64-byte binary string returned by hmac_sha512. whereas (assuming all inputs are ASCII) "md5(salt+pepper+password)" can still be brute-forced, just treat the pepper as part of the password you're looking for.
A reminder to talk to your users relentlessly
Lamer Smith has probably learned that he can get more money out of RIAA/MPAA by almost succeeding than actually succeeding, but I'm a cynic.

I seriously doubt his constituents even know what he's up to.
I could see it being depreciated for use on non-arrays, but at the moment the only other method of detecting an empty array is `!count($arr)`, which is significantly slower if the array isn't empty.

Ultimately this isn't a language issue, it's a training issue. If you're using empty in place of isset, you're doing it wrong, the both serve completely different purposes.