skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But Google is specifically digitizing the entire holdings of well stocked libraries, such as Harvard's. This activity directly argues against the thesis of the article: if we assume for the moment that any and all rights issues are resolved, then Bezos is quite right that every book currently available anywhere in any form could indeed be downloadable in 60 seconds.
Even books represented by a single extant copy could become widely available, potentially for the first time in centuries, in their "new" digital form. This is the exact opposite of any "recency" bias.
Erm, yes it does.
Can we get rid of the direct URL to log out?

http://news.ycombinator.com/logout
I would say that's more of an iPhone problem. I like the design as it is right now.
It's not advertised because mass use would take down their servers but someone on HN pointed this out (even your tweets will be encrypted [at least until they are globally published]:

https://twitter.com
They essentially deal with millions of real-time messages, each of which have a fairly complicated relationship tree. These issues aren't so much a database problem as a message passing and queuing problem.
The Ferengi Programmer
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474835
It is expressly discouraged, it's just an entirely subjective thing:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I have been watching the HN new queue turn into an "all tech news" feed, at some point it becomes a true firehose and there is not a chance at all of finding anything "thoughtfully submitted."

PG doesn't seem to have an issue with this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475779
Chinese automaker to sell cars at Wal-Mart, Costco?
In the case of sites that refer to user-specified images by just linking to the image (as with some forum software, at least a couple of years ago last I used such things), they need to change behavior, otherwise the upstream site can change content-type and content at the URL after validation and perform XSS on anyone that ends up seeing the "image."

I could be wrong about that, someone please correct me if so.
That used to be true for xkcd, too, but thankfully it seems to have disappeared. Same might happen to the other blogs you mention, if quality deteriorates. For example JoS lately has been writing more about his office woes and business travels than about software engineering in his blog.
Heroku? Google App Engine?
No, I'm talking about Twiddict. Even if you hit http://twitter.com/ they do the password authentication over https. Twiddict does not.
If you need an exhaustive list of apps, try this page (which I maintain): http://www.timetrackingresources.com/
30 new student passes to FOWA Miami available
So true. It took me months to get a emacs on a mac.
I'd be curious to know the article submission rate over time. PG?
PAIX: From Alta Vista to Facebook
Interesting list, but it would be nice if there was some order to it. The first thing that hit me was that it was not alphabetic, so I moused over the first link, noticed its was an affiliate link... then closed the window assuming it was just a scheme.
Our life expectancy, as you mean it, has not significantly increased in a very long time. Overall life expectancy appears to have increased because it's generally expressed as from birth, meaning that small reductions in infant mortality have large effects.

The life expectancy of an 18 year old now is barely less than it was before even antibiotics. The last really large jump came with the advent of indoor plumbing.

If you want more about the effects of diet on health, read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.
OK. Didn't read clearly. OAuth will be rolled out eventually.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150864

I made an xkcd script and ran it for a week...it did decently well. The community consensus was that most people already have XKCD in their RSS feed, so it's just noise. Something more intelligent that posted stories based on popularity (startup idea anyone?) might fly, but I think people would be pissed if they found out it was a script.
A malicious machine that wants to DoS a server doesn't need web hooks in order to make a bunch of requests to the server. It can just run ab, the Apache Benchmark program.
Unfortunately Handykey (makers of the Twiddler) are out of business for the time being. Fortunately, there is some work in our lab along with Chris George, founder of Handykey, to build a Bluetooth version of the Twiddler that follows the Bluetooth HCID Profile.

http://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/ccg/classes/7470/7470-f06/bluetoot...
I use http://harvestapp.com and http://www.timepost2.com/ to post from my Macbook. I really love Harvest. Great design, email out invoices, right balance of simplicity and features.

TimePost is overpriced, though...you could probably find a cheaper solution. I think Harvest has a dashboard widget.
I think windsurfer will be responsible logging everyone out of the system :).
Why can't you just pass this to X number of servers?
http://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/ccg/classes/7470/7470-f06/bluetoot...

These guys worked on a Bluetooth version that was HCI Profile compliant. They worked for my advisor.
Create RSS Feeds From Myspace Artist Tour Dates
If you haven’t read my post on using PHP and Simple HTML DOM parser to scrape artist tour dates off myspace then check that out first seeing as this post starts where that one ended. I’ve received countless emails and noticed in my Google Analytics a large percentage of visitors reach my site by searching for Myspace RSS feeds. Myspace Artist Tour Dates in RSS format to be more precise. I’ve had this idea for quite some time but never created it. Tonight I spent about 4 hours putting together what I’d like to introduce as the first version of Dr. Myspace. Built specifically to allow you to create RSS feeds from Myspace artist tour dates. It’s extremely simple in it’s architecture but extremely useful at the same time.
Here's an interesting set of slides by Prof. Richard S. Lindzen of MIT:

Is there a basis for global warming alarm? http://www.ycsg.yale.edu/climate/forms/LindzenYaleMtg.pdf
Simple Bash Domain Availability Checking
Journyx wasn't terrible (it has been ~3 years since I have used it). I believe it is free for individuals, but you'll have to check.
I disagree. Obsessiveness with small methods means less opportunity to keep your transient state in local variables, meaning you are going to make it object state (use object fields), which would actually increase your side effects.

Edit: It occurred to me that there is a case when you need to move state out of the stack to global or instance variables: programming async IO. It is notoriously inconvenient for exactly this reason.
Corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) is a full billing system that includes time tracking for projects and invoicing.

Some of its other features include interaction with your online banking site and allowing your customers to login to your site and pay their invoices with a credit card.

Disclaimer: I am the author of it.
Hahaha ... Yes it can.
Now you'll be responsible for the slowliness of hn.
Have the name of the sneder in RSS and the Karma.
I think you're right. If you embed any image you don't have control over or allow users to do that then js embedded in the supposed image could gank your session cookies. Avoidance strategies(?):
1) Copy embedded images to your server, validate, and substitute link on your server for off-site link
2) To avoid cross-site scripting hacks anyway, store ip address along with session key on your server and validate that with every request. (Won't protect against attackers on the same side of a NAT though.)

This would also affect images embedded in emails, assuming user is using Outlook or IE to read mails?
Study Shows Speaking Up More Makes You Seem More Competent... Even if You're Not
The simple answer is: In the beginning they thought Twitter would more like Livejournal and architected accordingly (not that LJ is the pinnacle of good architecture or anything but even so). Instead it turned out to be more like IM and rather than starting again they decided to hack it into working.
The Author's Guild is a pathetically small and out dated organization. They have 8,000 members, yet there's approximately 170,000 books published in the US every year and most authors only manage a handful of books per year, which suggests they have an exceptionally small member group, this is if all their members are authors, which they're not a lot of their members are agents and attorneys. Compare this with the SFWA and as a niche market, SF/F/H, you would expect them to have significantly less members, yet they have 1500, which is a comparatively large number. The other thing that lends credence to the SFWA over the Author's Guild, is that I actually hear of the SFWA outside of stupid legal arguments. The last Author's Guild scheme was against the whole google book scanning thing, I believe Google paid them off and now no one has the legal right to sue google for it ever again.
+2 for FreshBooks (I have two paying accounts). I'm also launching an app very shortly that extends FreshBooks--it's got an awesome API.
Could somebody parse that title please? Since the climate is always changing, only the destruction of a large part of the solar system would "mean climate change is behind us"

I really hate to start in on these "World is ending because of the evils of mankind" discussions yet again. But that title sucks.
As I read it, the issue he's talking about is that it's easy to accidentally write a test that passes the first 100 000 times you write it, but then fails the next time because of a timeout that was set too low or something like that. A test like that can waste a lot of your time tracking down a nonexistent bug.

It's true that any particular test that spuriously fails one in a million times may never fail. But if you have tens of thousands of tests, and you do tens of test runs per day, you'll have a test spuriously fail once a day or so.
I'd love the ability to deploy my little learning-iPhone-SDK apps to my iPhone (to get the 'oh wow' feeling that I built something) but that's going to require $99 and getting a provisioning certificate from Apple. And in fact, I may pay the $99, just to be able to do this (not necessarily to sell apps).

I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sharing games outside of the approved ecosystem). They came from Homebrew but that's in the Cambrian age for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club
Perhaps I've become an FP zealot, but I just can't agree at all with this author's suggestion. Small methods, "agile", unit testing, and all that are fine and lovely, but none of them approach the kind of safety and composability you get from true FP.
We can't replicate, but this has been modded up very high - can someone show me a screenshot or help us out? Thanks!
Yeah its possible to make one, the cost is time. Learn some HTML and CSS basics, then a little bit of PHP & MySQL, that would give you an understanding with which you would be able to edit and customise wordpress or any other CMS for your own website. You could even come up with your own CMS (content management system).

Well, let me know if I could be of any help - madetokill.com O_o
I use TimmyOnTime ( http://www.timmyontime.com ) for my time-tracking (my company created this product) and GnuCash for billing/accounting.

TimmyOnTime uses with instant-messaging (GoogleTalk, MSN, Jabber) for real-time time-tracking so that tt easily becomes part of your work flow.
When something breaks in production, it's easier to figure out what it was and fix it if you only changed a few things since the last time you updated production.
SciPy 0.7.0 released
The automatically updatable book
Sisters' diary of their quest to make their oat cuisine a hit
Ok, so, as a next step, how about we ask nicely for her to stop?

I'll get it.
Why OO may not suck, or, Take a ride on the Falsus Omnibus
Well, it's better than per-click micropayments. I think most people are willing to pay a set amount for news as a sort of utility as long as it goes to the outlets they choose and they don't have to evaluate the payment with each click.

From the newspaper's standpoint, they become mendicants, or worse... PBS or NPR. I don't think that will sit well with many in the industry, but faced with an inefficient, obsolete business model and eventual bankruptcy, the NPR-ization of all media just might be their only option.
Thymer might just be what you're looking for.

It has intuitive data entry (easy as paper), support for projects, clearly seperates personal todos from work tasks. (So you can use the same todo system for personal matters and billable hours) and much more. Of course you can also generate reports (which you can customize to an extent). Focus on simplicity and usability -- drag and drop where possible, undo for every task, and so on.

Currently in private alpha -- beta coming soon. If you're interested, check it out at http://www.thymer.com

(In case it wasn't obvious -- this is a shameless plug)
We allow sites up to 300K daily. The default plans just go up to 100K, but you can create a custom plan also.
Hacker style versus the Dijkstra style
Recently, I have been thinking about these two opposing styles: the hacker style ---rapid prototyping and incremental improvement---, and the Dijkstra (academic?) style ---think hard and get it right the first time---.

Given a problem, the hacker style is to:
1. Suggest a partial solution
2. Improve solution,
add to solution to cover all cases
3. Repeat 2 as necessary.

In contrast the Dijkstra style is to:
1. Think hard to get the RIGHT solution
2. Justify that it is the right method,
if failed throw it away
3. Go to 1 as necessary
4. Build solution using the method.

The hacker style makes you get started and enables you to make steady progress. Even though the resultant system is not always an elegant solution, you are blessed with the advantage of predictability, and always having a more-or-less working product.

Dijkstra style prevents you to commit the sin of over-specialization and to settle with a complex or suboptimal solution when there is an elegant solution that also covers the general case of the problem. The downside is that you may not able to make any progress at all, since you are not to accept a mediocre solution.

I am sure the HN community has a lot of success stories and arguments supporting Hacker style over the Dijkstra style. I am wondering if you had any cases where the Dijkstra style saved you, and I am interested in hearing your arguments/anecdotes supporting the Dijkstra style over the Hacker style.
These numbers aren't counting the contractors.
> But I do believe that the patented model Kachingle represents can work...

Given the In re Bilski, anyone have any ideas about the status of this patent? My understanding was that process patents had to transform an article's state or be bound to specific hardware (but I'm not an IP specialist).
If you're doing 10 releases a day and someone notices a bug then:

A) You can quickly fix it reducing the number of people that see that bug.

B) You can probably release the fix without breaking other things.

Is it better for you to release 5 bugs that 5% of your users sees for a few hours or release 1 bug that 100% of your users see for 2 weeks?
Interesting, I wonder why they didn't go with something more self explanatory:

Connection: -> X-Ignore-X:
Yahoo BOSS API is no longer free
Yes. You do not see naked recursion very often in, say, Haskell. Most of the time you use the built-in combinators or roll your own.
Speaking of P2P technologies, I was interested to run across a KaZaA server:

HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
X-Kazaa-Username: anonymous_user
X-Kazaa-Network: KaZaA
X-Kazaa-IP: xx.xx.xx.xx:1348
X-Kazaa-SupernodeIP: xx.xx.xx.x:3699

It looked like it was running on someone’s DVR. Anyone have any pointers as to what software does that?

Uh, Kazaa does that. Not a DVR.
I think a better solution is to have an incredibly low barrier to entry (never know if you are a good programmer until you try it, so getting more people to try means more good programmers), and then focusing on improving your programmer selection (if you are hiring). If a bad programmer can't get a job, then they will most likely find another path in life. (If they keep writing bad code for themselves, who cares?)

As far as open source is concerned, bad programmers don't bother me, because you can generally find a solution written by someone that is good.
The Postmodernism Generator (hit refresh a few times)
Blockbuster integrates games into Total Access subscription
He also said something about backticks. But they are easy, too.
Wow! Thanks for posting this - I smiled nonstop while reading. Methods like this, or coalescent trees have a lot of potential for NLP and other fields. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some clever person invents a procedure to construct an automatic data-driven etymology for words and phrases.
You can use the new version with the old color scheme. In the settings there is a section for "theme" or whatever and one of the themes is "classic" or similar.
The simplest explanation for "OCR is watching you" is an old web attack called "HTTP Response Splitting"; it happens when a server generates headers (like a Referer) based on user input, but doesn't escape out newlines.
for "micro-analytics", try http://userfly.com, http://clicktale.com, or http://crazyegg.com
I'm very surprised that they were allowed to run a food production business (initially) from a home kitchen. That would never fly in the USA.
Functionality Principals for Web Apps in 2009
Here's hoping News.YC doesn't become "Job board for suits looking for hackers"...
The Airlines will Make you Deaf
As long as they keep putting the changes into labs, they're not hurting anyone.
Looks like the dawn of email as a platform.
New paper shows how to get control without injecting new code
Marvin Minsky's thoughts about this problem. He was thinking about the OLPC project in particular.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Drawbacks_of_Age-Based_Segregation
A post sent by a human indicates that a human has found that particular post interesting. Automatically submitting every article from a blog using a bot I think goes against the spirit of this site. If everyone agrees that every single article on that blog is interesting then they can subscribe to it using RSS and keep the articles out of HN.
What Could Facebook Do to Increase Its Digital Goods Revenue?
Innovative marketing - optical illusion billboards
X-No: I will not give you a job for poking at my headers. But nice try.
I use it and like it. I don't do a ton a freelance work, but it keeps me from having to think to much about invoicing.

The timer-in-the-menu-bar is really nice, as is the feature that detects inactivity and asks you if you just forgot to stop the clock.
This problem is nothin'. You want a real problem in this vein? Check out Nate McFeters' GIFAR attack. The long/short of it:

GIF's have headers. Java JAR files, being ZIP archives, have trailers. To read a GIF, the image rendering code readers a header off the beginning of the file. To read a JAR, the unzip code seeks to the end of the file. It is therefore possible to have a perfectly valid, displayable GIF image that is simultaneously a perfectly valid, executable JAR file. Go ahead and upload it to your web app.

Why is this a problem? Because the Same Origin policy for Java applets is fucked up. Java applets have affinity for the site that delivered the bits for the applet itself; if you upload a GIFAR to Flickr, and Flickr doesn't catch it, you've now hosted a Java applet on Flickr that has Same Origin affinity to Flickr. Compose an "<object>" tag somewhere else on the Internet (pref. MySpace) and you've owned up the Flickr session for anyone who trips over it.

But wait! There's more! The Same Origin affinity for a GIFAR stored locally --- locally? how? an exercise for the reader! --- is localhost! A GIFAR that lands on your hard drive can, driven from an "<object>" tag anywhere on the Internet, make arbitrary TCP connections to services on your own host. Did you password your MySQL server?

Browsers are far and away the most difficult pieces of software we have to secure.
Hm. Still not certain how I would record that...
I just posted something related to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476787

The Interbook technology/brand I've developed is designed to let you keep books in print, but update them on-line when and where appropriate.
Google loves Hacker News. Does anybody know, why?
Why We're Probably in For a Long Recession
Htc Touch HD 8282 Windows Mobile (Unlocked)
HTC Touch HD 8282 this 5 megapixel camera phone also supports video recording and can capture essential moments in superb quality. The 3.8 Inch screen is large enough to offer a comfortable visual experience. It has TouchFLO software.
Never happened to me. And I am über-obvious.
If they were actively trying to pass a turing test, the least they could do is space out the submissions and throw in something that not from infoworld every now and then.

Having a handful posted all at once to the same domain at the same time each day is kind of flagrant.
> She's there for one-on-one help if the students have trouble with the content.

I hope Denver really vets its teachers well then. I remember going through public school in the 80's, and having to be careful which questions I asked in class because the teacher would be literally learning the material at the same time as the students. The teachers under this new system, in order to be effective, will have had to already gain familiarity with the course content ahead of time; they won't be able to afford any "Yukari Tanizaki" type teachers who drop all prep work when away from school...
New kindle audio feature causes a stir: the right to read a book out loud
How Your Brain Creates God
Interesting, so its something to actually learn from in regards to initial design flexibility.

But if I might ask? Would re-designing the entire architecture to accommodate for its current use be a wise idea to solve their downtime issue? I am just curious
Why not just ban Infoworld articles for a week or two to send the message?
I don't like that getclicky does not allow specific URLs (i.e. http://www.abc.edu/~username)

For the above URL, it cuts it down to http://www.abc.edu/
The Open-Door Bailout
Last time I've checked it was hard to install it even on Python 2.6 on Windows therefore mentioning Python 3 is redundant.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476584

Comments perhaps better directed there.
Ask HN: Help me with this project - Gizmoojo.com
I've been maintaining Gizmoojo.com for the past few years and did not had the time to do anything with it. So I've been thinking about doing more with Gizmoojo and so have started thinking about ideas on how I could extend or revamp Gizmoojo.

Gizmoojo started out as gizmo/gadget review site. The whole concept counts on average geeks/joes to create review/content on the gadgets that they love. In doing so, they get to share revenue from Amazon Associates Ads on their review pages. So here is an actual review page: http://gizmoojo.com/moojos/show/12

Well as you can see, the site has a cool design (IMO) but the show stopper is getting people to sign up and submit reviews.

What should I do with Gizmoojo? I really would appreciate any suggestions/ideas/help on what should I do next.

Here's what I'm thinking about. Making Gizmoojo sort of a gadget wiki but on steroids. Meaning, each gadget/gizmo/device gets it own dedicated page. Users can edit pages like a wiki and thus maintaining history of edits. Pull in amazon reviews, tweets, pics from flickr. Users can submit deals on that item.

Are you a rails developer or learning rails? If you are interested on working on this project, I'm happy to discuss. Email me ( address's in my profile )