skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am lucky that my business is in a fairly low-competition niche where having a great site really is enough to get in the game. I've not noticed much in the way of link buying amongst the sites in my niche, and link buying is not a world that I've ever felt the need to delve into myself.

But I have friends running ecommerce sites in more competitive niches. They compete with the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and other mass-market retailers that sell everything (albeit rarely covering the niche products as well as the specialists do). For years they have been insistent that, despite what Google's guidelines say, they wouldn't stand a chance of being found in the organic search results if they didn't buy links.

Since Penguin things have gone topsy turvy for them. Many of the competing businesses with good sites and happy customers have disappeared from the rankings after receiving penalties. Some are going bust as the margins are too thin to make adwords work. The spammers with junk sites suffer (good), but also the smaller businesses with good sites offering something extra that can't be found from the big box stores. As a result, the consumers suffer too (as all they see is a small selection of products on Amazon and a smattering of link-buying businesses that have been lucky enough to evade the penalties).

I'm not familiar enough with this situation to offer a strong personal opinion. But I wonder if this might be an issue that Google sweeps under the carpet somewhat... That actually "build it and they will come" doesn't usually work when you're up against companies with thousands of links (many of which are paid links, whether they look like it or not).
Any more info on the encrypted VMs and how they work ?

Do they use TrueCrypt volumes ? What are the alternatives ?
Does this article correct for increased thresholds to perform some actions? The down-vote used to be easier to get, for example.
> its a trivial enhancement on a conventional linked list.

Indeed it is. The patent should not have been granted, and from previous discussions about this, there is ample evidence of prior art.

However, exaggerating this patent by claiming it is a "linked list" patent diminishes the conversation around patents. It doesn't make patents sound worse. It makes those who are anti-patent seem disingenuous. This patent is bad enough on its own merits without implying that someone was granted a patent for the linked list concept as a whole. If Subaru were issued a patent for a new method of fuel injection, would it be appropriate to claim that they were issued a patent for the internal combustion engine?

> This is a patent for a data structure. There is no implementation there.

What is a data structure if not an implementation?
How would it work with object pooling if I wanted to query a large table of data? This is often needed in real big data applications.
How I Interpret Jeff Atwood’s: How to stop at sucking and be awesome.
I missed the original post on coding horror but came across a video of Jeff giving the presentation at the 2012 Atlassian summit. After watching the video I wrote up a new blog post about my thoughts on Jeff's talk. I am new at blogging so I would love any feedback you guys have.

Link To Blog Post: http://oakcitylabs.com/2012/10/17/how-i-interpret-jeff-atwoods-how-to-stop-at-sucking-and-be-awesome
Annotations (or decorators) are good idea as it is — they are very popular in Python. The bad part is that they are implemented horribly — as comment which are later parsed.

This should be implemented in PHP core or at least someone should write extension for it. That would solve implementation problems and add new, good feature to PHP language.
Coming from a java background to rails I found it entirely refreshing that everything wasn't in a utility class or service. Decomposition of a system using utility classes and services(in the n-tier style) is to make your system more procedural rather than more OO. This article is encouraging more OO patterns, closer in spirit to DDD. The article doesn't actually go into this but all of the techniques described can be used to compose a class so that there is still a single API for each model in your system i.e. the decomposition into policies, decorators, services(of the domain type) etc. can be hidden from the user behind the model api.
You can make the benchmark with Rails Metal, or with Rack.
If you want to compare non-blocking IO, use with eventmachine.
SonarSource Sonar book is out, free chapter inside
Having read quite a few development books i am so happy to have written one, especially for a platform as important as Sonar ,(...have been following and using the platform since its birth...), Head on to packt's site to download the first chapter for free...
Or perhaps even better:

How to feel like a god in the short term and lose big in the long term by disrespecting your competitors.
"First, there’s a full-size USB 2.0 port. This means you can connect your existing peripheral devices, including a mouse, printer, or phone to your tablet. (Ever wish you could charge your phone with your iPad?)"

Is he really sure that Surface will be able to charge another device via USB? Having a port is one thing, but being able to deliver required power while on battery is another.
Apple Buys Up Web App Developer Particle
"I chose to categorize content by the mention of things like big companies (i.e., Amazon, Google), Hot Startups (i.e. Pinterest, Instagram), Sensationalism (i.e. Best, Worst, First), Programming Languages (everything I could think of), and Profanity (which was fun)."

What happens to stories that use sensationalism and profanity? Or sensationalism and a new startup?
> there are virtually no staff in the UK who can support it.

On the contrary, for at least one of the less well-known platforms, RabbitMQ, they are based in London: http://www.rabbitmq.com/contact.html

Saying that you can't get ruby devs in the UK is also not true.
I think the issue is that large plastic objects aren't sortable or compatible with the process used in the recycling centers.

Keep in mind that people do all sorts of crazy/stupid things with garbage. Things like hiding hazardous materials in the recycling. Hazardous includes biohazards (needles, medical supplies, toxic materials (mercury, reactive chemicals) and outright dangerous materials (explosives, old bullets, propane tanks).

Because of this, they need to design the system to accomodate the intended waste flow -- the safety measures intended to contain the explosion of a half-empty camp stove canister is very different that what is needed to contain a 20 lb propane tank.
Clickable link: http://oakcitylabs.com/2012/10/17/how-i-interpret-jeff-atwoo...
I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft Windows but I realize it has its place. Is one of those places, though, really on mission critical medical devices, and if so, what advantages does it provide over the alternatives, such as a hardened or more use-specific operating system?
That's kind of a really disappointing one sided view of the subject which I doubt is due to ignorance.

People get poisoned and sick from unregulated food outlets
People want regulated food outlets
People get government regulations
Brick and mortar restaurants have to support those regulations = expense
Brick and mortar restaurants have to pay local taxes as commercial establishments
Food Trucks show up and have none of these expenses = lower prices = take marketshare!

Food Trucks are great. They're disrupting an existing process. So either give them roughly the same rules as the restaurants (regulations and taxes) or reduce those on the restaurants. Just don't advocate that these are all just rules that have nothing in mind except to target food trucks. That's insulting to folks intelligence.
I agree. I managed to get out of all my general education requirements thanks to my AP credits. I'll be graduating a year early thanks to them next semester.
By the same author:

"A method includes addressing, through a command generated by an application executing on a computing platform, one or more device(s) in storage communication with the computing platform based on an appropriate communication link. The method also includes accessing, based on the addressing, a physical register of the one or more device(s) through an appropriate interface therein. Further, the method includes obtaining statistical information associated with a performance of the one or more device(s) at the computing platform through the access of the physical register."

http://www.google.com/patents/US20120144069
The heat could be used to heat up houses or provide warm water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
Inside look at Googles Datacenters
I don't think the article says Git is way better. It says it is way more popular, which is clearly true.
I don't like the tone of the article. It implies that Pinterest is withholding this vital feature, just to spite users, and this pin league site is freeing us from their tyranny. I find it much more likely that Pinterest is simply testing the feature and wants to make sure it performs properly before releasing it to the masses.
EDIT: spelling.
Rock band 'Garbage' Twitter account Hacked to spam monetized link
I prefer the /etc/hosts hack, putting in entries like `127.0.0.1 twitter.com`. That way, when I actually want to visit Twitter, I have to `sudo vim /etc/hosts`, enter my password, comment out the host entry, save, go to Twitter, and then uncomment the entry, save and quit when I'm ready to block it again.

The inconvenience of the action is what makes it work. If I only had to type `workmode stop` I'd have that committed to muscle memory by the end of a work day or two.
Media disruption: it is not journalism, it is advertising
Another factor that makes AP classes worth it: the AP classes in my school were the most difficult classes you could take, and thus attracted the smartest students. The next-hardest classes, the Level 1s, were full of people goofing off and not taking the class seriously. I'd rather be in the room with people smarter than me.

(Class of 2003 if that's relevant.)
UTF-8 Everywhere: A Manifesto
There's also that element of Karma I suppose.
The Perks of Working From Home
var hostsFile = process.platform == "linux" ? "/etc/hosts/" : "C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts";

Surely this won't work on anything but Windows.
This is meaningless. Pyramid is a newer framework (newest of those listed?)
The examinators should probably be fired.
In the patent-law sense, an implementation is a manifestation in hardware that performs some function.
The only sorts of patents that should be granted are ones where you fire giant snowballs into the desert in order to irrigate it.

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=...
This was actually pretty good. Quite relevant to software engineering. Being able to admit both ignorance and failure can be very difficult.
Amazon’s Kindle Whispercast service
Did you read the article? The health and welfare provisions of the law aren't being contested-just the part where its illegal for anyone other than an established restaurant or agent of an existing restaurant to operate a food truck. The rules requiring safe food handling and preparation are not the issue.
I want to use common crawl to periodically fetch crawled data for some of the sites. How frequently does common crawl updates its data set. Does it crawl all sites?
Anyone know the cost of getting a patent like this?
Wikileaks, Desperate For Money, Erects Paywall And Angers Hacker ..
As someone who took 11 AP courses in high school and received 5/5 on each for ~35hrs of college credit at Texas A&M University, a nationally respected engineering college, I feel I can speak authoritatively on the benefits this has for students.

Before proceeding, here is the list of tests I took:

Sophomore Year: Geography

Jr Year: Calculus BC, Micro & Macro Economics, Government, English Language

Sr Year: Computer Science AB, Physics C, Statistics, English Literature

I also had amazing teachers, many award winning including a NASA scientist and a former Defense Department programmer.

First, most of the best colleges limit the scores they are willing to accept in exchange for credit. When I attended college, 5s were required in major specific studies in order to receive credit at Texas A&M, which if I recall correctly was how it was at MIT, the Naval Academy and various others. A 5 on an AP exam in my opinion is par for a passing grade in a college course. When I started at Texas A&M as a Mathematic/CS dual major, I started in Calculus 3 and CS 211 (~3rd semester equivalent). Material-wise I was more than capable of handling the classes, and even found that my background had been far more rigorous than many of the other students.

The only problem AP courses caused for me were an issue of my advisor who allowed me to take 15 hrs of sophomore level courses my first semester as a Freshman including: Discrete Math, Cal 3, CS 211, Statistics 211 and Biology 101. In retrospect, this was a huge mistake. Emotionally, I was not prepared to handle the course-load and struggled. This was exacerbated by the fact that it had actually been a year since I'd taken any Calculus since I took the AP Cal BC exam my Jr year. I would have been much better off with the minimum course-load (12 hrs) and a few lighter classes. Unfortunately, due to my entire semester's worth of earned credits and a dual major, I had little to no "lighter" courses left to take in my degree plan.

All in all, to hear someone claiming AP exams are a "scam" is absurd and laughable to me. They saved me roughly $20,000 in in-state tuition & board at a public university! I expect the savings to someone attending a private university would be far more profound (on the order of $100k). If anything, the biggest problem with the AP system is that schools do not sufficiently equip students to either take the exams or made sufficiently aware of the benefit they offer.
By not using / * * to start your comment block ?
The solution is NOT to make the mothership government and computer under your desk the sovreign ruler over what you can and cannot do on your computer, your mind. We are thinking on a decade and century level timescale here.

I don't care if some artist or some coder somewhere doesn't get paid for some work well done. The future of our species is at stake here and we are trying to paint a bright future for your great grandchildren.

A future where your children rule over the machine, not where the machine rules over you. In my machine, I may break the law if I choose to do so. the machine under my desk shall not be made into an iron fist of the government. I will fight this to the death. we have your best interests in mind. the internet is going to become a mind, and we need to protect this baby. It is still an infant.

the government has no idea how to raise it, it only knows how to bleed it and tax it. I give this baby a voice.
Good overview, though I wish they'd balanced it out with some of the negatives.
how do they manage their databases, this would be interesting if the system is truely distributed
Bottle is wonderful, but Pyramid far more comprehensive. Flask is magic, no doubt, but the author is enough of a pain to put me off the product.
Toys That Teach Kids Computer Programming
Note for clarity: The data transfer would not remain anonymous, only the trackers facilitating it.
You should probably resubmit the actual link directly, as many people prefer just to click on that. :)
if you're on a mac, Gas Mask is a really good tool to switch between different /etc/hosts files

http://www.clockwise.ee/gasmask/

here's my 'focus mode'

https://gist.github.com/2564478
I'm not sure the wheel has really been invented yet, at least in the case of JS. One of the things I found was that all the libraries had little or nothing to say about "error handling". Error handler bodies are always given with a comment like this -

function (error) {
// handle error
}

What do you do there? Exit the process? How to recover and continue from some critical point? Can you retry some part of the action? Can you try some alternative actions if something fails?

So I felt we can do better and .... surprise .... wrote my own heavy weight (1 kloc) library that provides a richer-than-usual set of composeable async primitives emphasizing error management including recovery, restarts, alternatives, etc.

So, here is yet another "wheel" :)

https://github.com/srikumarks/IO.js
Although I never saw one myself, I heard that during NT times, it was relatively easy to get a custom (but still supported) build of the system from MS that matched some requirements if you had reasons and enough cash for it (which medical device producers did).

I'm not sure if that's still possible these days, considering windows server weights in disk space and memory than an usual device should ever require... Maybe someone has first-hand / more up to data information about it?
Couldn't agree more. Every time I use annotations I feel dirty...

Programmers who talk so much about code separation, clean modular structure etc are the same ones are willing to use annotations. What got into them?

Disclaimer: I like code to be elegant. And practical. This is PHP we're talking about, but no need to do more bad choices...
I understand basic physics and statistics but when I think of the fact that they teased out a 0.5 m/s signal on something 40 trillion kilometers away, it might as well be magic.
I don't know if you're a rich guy planning to marry down in the social hierarchy, living in a culture where where women don't work or just a misogynist but this is generally false in the west. Dual incomes with a single household is very economical compared to life as a single.

See eg. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dinks.asp "A household in which there are two incomes and no children (either both partners are working or one has two incomes). DINKS are often the target of marketing efforts for luxury items such as expensive cars and vacations."
Is it really surprising that Hacker News doesn't care about Pinterest?
Even if they find them all, they would have to have a system that automatically finds them when they reappear.

Imagine trying to detect copyrighted songs from Youtube if users could upload code bundled with the videos and load balance requests.

I will assume fingerprints of detected instances will travel between cloud provides, and that pirate bay will then add code to prevent that.
But How Do You Really Feel? Someday the Computer May Know
Where the Internet lives - photographic look inside Google’s data centers
So this is a linked list that's ordered in two different ways? If I create a third pointer to reorganize the same data in a third way, can I patent that on top?
I believe linked lists are much older than that though.
clickable: http://taurus.io/
Of course it's a marketing play. Why else would a company willingly commit large sums of money to a completely unrelated business venture. And anyone who was watching the feed before and after the jump will know they did do plenty of back-story on Joe Kittinger and his original mission.
The fact that the project managers and office staff at my workplace are unable to / incapable of using git is a deal-breaker. Git needs serious work in this regard.
http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/
I think these are taken directly from the Reddit AMAA: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11kyja/iam_panos_panay...
> I really do not like the CollegeBoard, especially how they have the monopoly on standardized testing. If you want to get into any respectable college you must go through them and take the SAT, or at least some AP courses. They really are a for-profit "non-profit" company, where they squeeze as much money from you as possible. Yes, grading tests takes money, but at $89/exam, it's cost prohibitive for those from low-income families.

I agree with you about the dubiousness of the College Board's non-profit status, but the only test I or my parents had to pay for was the SAT. Of course, this was in 97-98, so maybe things have changed. I always viewed College Board as a means of extracting money from the schools, not the students.

> However, in my college search over the past year or so, I haven't seen a college that doesn't accept at least some form of AP credit.

The university I went to for my freshman year (Florida International University) flat out refused to let anyone skip English Lit, no matter how may tests you passed. I did, however, get credit for English Comp and Cal I.

I didn't have many AP options at my high school. I took four (Cal AB, both English, and French) and only could have taken two more (US History and Anatomy).
Python Fastest Web Framework
I would really appreciate any suggestions for other programmable toys that should be included in the list.

When I was a kid, I saved up money for months to buy a programmable tank toy called a Big Track. That toy was an important part of making me into a professional software developer years later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6V-tuOf3dE

I was very happy to discover the Bee-Bot, because now I have a young daughter, and I want her to play with something like the Big Track. The Bee-Bot is awesome because it's designed for kids who can't even read.

Any other suggestions along these lines, or more advanced stuff for older kids, would be much appreciated.
Two questions:

Why are these devices connected to a network, let alone the internet?

Why are these devices running windows? Don't get me wrong I run it too, but that doesn't mean it makes sense on something like this.
Another possibility: people have tired of your formula. Andrey Karpov used to submit blog posts with the results of running his fancy commercial static analyzer on various open source code to Reddit. The first several got a lot of upvotes; a while later it became clear that it was mostly hocking a product. The more your blog comes to resemble an infomercial the less you can expect to be on the front page.
I would expect Knuth of all people to discard that broken notation. He has he smarts and chutzpah to do better.

I always hard that notation.
>>> "A crime that possibly merits a £2000 fine and some community service (and firing the people responsible for securing those systems)."

I guess this is probably the rub. When you trespass into your neighbors backyard to jump in their pool at night and you get caught, that could be a fine and community service. When you trespass on military property, let's say you hop a fence or sneak your way into a government building... That's kind of a big deal.

When you work your way into government servers and delete data... That's not just community service. That's kind of a big deal.
Multiple internal storage linked lists should be a prime example. I was using them on my 1995 racing game [1], where each car was contained in a global list of cars (for game logic and rendering), a list of cars for each sector of the track (for driving AI), and a list of cars for each map tile (for collisions).

Not sure if this is formally valid prior art, as each list a car is part of can be considered different lists (i.e. different set of members), not different sequences on the same set.

Frankly, I'd rather see this abomination be dismissed on the grounds of being obvious.

[1] https://github.com/TheJare/SpeedHasteSrc/blob/master/game/th...
Shameless plug: http://gitpilot.com this is part of the problem that we are trying to solve. We would love more feedback.
ImaginEngine game studio shuts down (exclusive)
Nope, Claim 2 is for a tertiary pointer as well. Your attempt to patent a triply-sequenced linked-list would be rejected as insufficiently innovative. Unlike the patent in question. cough
Google's Metagame
Decisions Decisions
This is not very useful "perspective" - as far as I can see this benchmark is run using "rails s" which boots up the WEBrick server - I seriously doubt you'd find anyone using that in production! Maybe it's best to leave this as a Rails apple-to-apples comparison...