skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed that the base installs are rubbish.

But clean install of Windows 7 or 8 + ninite.com. Windows generally has the drivers you need out of box, or at least the NIC / wireless driver so Windows update can find the rest for you, automatically. I can't remember the last time I had to manually get a driver for something, with the single exception of a USB to serial adapter I need for work.
I think "design inspiration" is a bit lenient. He even copied the Gylpish popsicle icon.
Sure, it's security through obscurity...

IMO, there's nothing wrong with a little security through obscurity if:

1) It's not your main game plan, just an extra obstacle. Anything can be compromised eventually, so you buy extra margin.

2) The obscurity is agile. Similar to benchmarking password complexity vs. projected brute-force capabilities of enemies and rotating passwords accordingly, rotate the obscurity- acknowledge that your enemies will figure it out eventually, and change it up faster than you think they can figure it out.
Interesting idea, but I find myself bored watching the videos, hoping they get funny (in some cases ... at all), and it's souring my experience of the service itself as a result :(
What will prevent modem/router manufacturers from embedding an ad-filtering proxy into their devices (ie, eroding the need for a specialized AdTrap)?
The Schadenfraude is strong in this one.
No ads on the Internet? Seriously, how do you think the economy would work without ads? If everyone got one of these, I could tell my boss on monday to close the company.
> At the end of the day, someone has root, and that guy can do pretty much anything.

I do not disagree with your overall assessment, but this is not strictly true. Most good real-world security schemes don't follow the 'root is God'-model of Unix, and for good reason. It's perfectly possible to design a system where each operation performed by a "superuser" must be validated, or at least logged.
They have been doing this for years!!

http://www.bonsoni.com/post_ad.php
First, salary is often times the most direct way a company says how much you're worth. Thus salary in our monkey brains equals status, and real or percived differences leads to conflict.

Second, some companies like to get away with underpaying people. I'm not sure it's smart but they do. I know I worked with someone who did the same thing I did for 45% less.
There's no denying that the US is better at making tech billionaires than Europe, but the US list of top tech billionaires is hardly a picture of new thinking and innovation: Gates, Allen and Balmer are all from Microsoft (which, like SAP, was founded in the 70s). One would be Ellison (Oracle was founded in the 70s too). And one would be Dell (and making computers is something the British invented).
>I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next".

Well, if you use the Windows Store to get applications, you can finally get rid of them.

>the OS has almost nothing bundled

Really? Windows 8, for instance, comes with much of what you'd need. It's bundles a lot more than previous versions of windows

>nothing you can choose in that "next" wizard.

I'm not quite sure what this means.
I feel that this is one of the major reasons I find myself using tablets more often.

The UX on PCs has turned to crap. All programs want to run in the background, they all compete for my attention every 30 minutes, they all want to be updated all the time and they all want to install some stupid toolbar into my browser that you can't remove, or even if you do it will somehow come back. Installing new programs has turned into a 10-minute minigame of "spot the checkbox that screws up your computer deep in the Custom Install settings!". Or sometimes I have to re-read a question in a randomly intruding dialog box 5 times just to figure out if I should answer Yes or No to their vague question for them to just please leave my computer alone. It's extremely annoying. I also can't remember the number of times I've cleaned up my msconfig startup. The programs just magically insert themselves back somehow over time. It's infuriating and exhausting.

I feel protected on my iPad from this torture.
Unfortunately, the profit in those laptops comes from the shovel ware, so there's no incentive for OEMs to sell a pro-user experience.
Interesting to do this in hardware, as it will work for all devices on your network: also tablets and so on.
However, I wonder how many people have separate modems and routers: Most providers (here at least) have modem/wifi AP combo's, which makes it impossible to put this in between.

Also, I wonder if some sites will stop working: e.g. I can imagine a video with a pre-roll just never starting, when the pre-roll can't be loaded. And it being hardware, this will be harder to skip.
Windows 8 has a factory reset button... this would be a great option, except I expect that on retail systems it would reinstall the crapware. Or maybe not?
In addition to ninite, pcdecrapifier[1] is also handy, even for cleaning machines that aren't brand new. Doesn't look like it supports windows 8 yet though.

[1] http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
so true. especially the part about not having experience in trying to know about the audience. I think it is really important what the audience wants. At times, you may find it tempting not to do certain things coz nobody is watching but i believe people eventually will.
Rare and Iconic Photos of Einstein Celebrate His Nobel Win 90 Years Ago
The problem with mobile devices is that when they are prefilled with OEM crap (mine came with Motoblur, Blockbuster, and several other terrible media-streaming apps), there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Windows may have a terrible default experience, but at least it's fixable.
This is nonsense fanboism. Modern versions of Windows are extremely similar to OS X from a usability perspective. OS X has plenty of counterintuitive warts. Computers of any flavor are pretty hard to use.

> I never understood the install wizards for windows software...

I never understood why half the time when I download Mac software and double click it, nothing seems to happen because it's a "disk image" (talk about an outdated concept), which means I have to know to navigate to the Finder, find the actual thing I want, and then remember to unmount the image when I'm done.
So I don't know the situation but as an American living in Argentina for 5 years I can say a few things about how traffic accidents work here.

So, say you are making a legal left turn on a one-way street, onto another one way street, and a motorcycle flys around you ON THE LEFT from behind and doesn't see you turning, and plows into you. (Incidentally, all motorcycle drivers do this here - if you visit, don't drive until you understand the alternate "physics" of driving in South America.) In this case, even though you were in front, you signaled, you were in the leftmost lane, etc, a number of things will happen in the resulting police investigation and inevitable court cases (remember i'm sort of 'americanizing' the situation - the exact law and actors are slightly different but this is essentially what happens):

First, you will get sued by the motorcycle driver in civil court for multiple hundreds of thousands of pesos, probably at least $150k US. Second, you will get sued in criminal court (possibly by the "DA") with a crime - in fact it's possible both of you will, but let's assume in this case you have a job as a software developer like Daniel and the other guy is working for much less. In this case the suing will be mostly from the low-wage earner to (potential) high-wage earner. It is a near-guarantee, that though the high-wage earner did not do anything wrong, they or their insurance will pay a significant amount of money to the low-wage earner to settle the civil case. The fact of the matter is IT DOES NOT MATTER what happened in the actual traffic accident - it DOES NOT MATTER if you were or weren't at fault.

Now the cases will take possibly a year or longer and that means while they're going on, you're essentially an indicted criminal with multiple cases hanging over your head. If you travel or leave the country, etc, you may have a hard time - if you're an Argentine - leaving. I know people who have had to get a judge's permission to travel in this situation.

It's very possible, in fact, likely that the detritus of these court cases is hanging around and it has NOTHING to do with anything that David did, but the bureaucracy of Argentina sort of 'caught up' with him here in an odd way. Thank God they move so slowly most of the time - the number of absurd Kafkaesque situations like this is immense here mitigated mostly by institutional inefficiencies. However in this case I would guess that this is somehow the situation.
"In initial benchmarking with a hello world server, this is between 2 and 4 times faster than node.js." <- Is this true? Does this mean the interpreter is faster than V8?
> David's daughter died over two years ago in an car accident where another driver is at fault.

That's certainly not clear from the article. It says "On the way, a car suddenly stopped on the road. To avoid a collision, Daniel tried to dodge the car, which then collided with a truck".

I don't think you can infer from this who was at fault. If that car ahead was traveling in the same direction as he was before it stopped, then in many jurisdictions he would be at fault for following too close. You are supposed to stay far enough behind to stop safely no matter what the car ahead of you does.

It is odd that it would take this long for them to come after him, though, if that is what it is about. It usually doesn't take long in this kind of accident to figure out who is at fault and whether or not an arrest is warranted.

My guess is that it will turn out it is just a mistake. I'd expect that they were told not to leave the country until the investigation was complete, and due to some error (maybe on the police's part, maybe on their part), either they or the police ended up with a wrong notion of whether or not the travel restriction had ended. Result: they ended up leaving the country while the police thought they were still under orders to stay, and so they got reported to Interpol as fugitives.
Ask HN: informed opinions of Petraeus Gmail ('tptacek, 'paul, 'cperciva, etc)
As an active duty geek, I would really love a breakdown of the security issues surrounding an active duty person using GMail. Is CAC really any better than 2-factor authentication (eg, I have been told CAC will actually freely hand over all sorts of details about the card-holder to any server that asks)? In a hostile network environment, are there really any extra steps I should be taking besides using a machine I trust, and verifying the certificate chain?
I was interested to see what it's like for the US, so I did go through the forbes list [1]:

1. Bill Gates

2. Larry Ellison

3. Jeff Bezos

4. Sergey Brin

5. Larry Page

6. Steve Ballmer

7. Paul Allen

8. Michael Dell

9. Laurenne Powell Jobs (widow of Steve Jobs)

10. Mark Zuckerberg

If the definition of old is "younger than 20 years", this represents 3 startups (Amazon, Google, Facebook). If the definition is "younger than Skype", then only Facebook is left.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400

[edit: formatting]
What exactly is Google's Niantic Project? - TechSpot News
Without commenting on the suggestion itself, this really should be submitted as a PEP [1] and discussed in that context.

[1] - http://www.python.org/dev/peps/
If your an at will employee, which almost everyone is today then the company can fire you for no given reason. In practice disclosing salary isn't going to get your fired unless there are other reasons, but will get you labeled as a bad player.
Let US Take Care of Climate Change...or Climate Change Will Take Care of US
>I'm not quite sure what this means.

I was referring to the fact that Microsoft does not bundle multiple browsers to choose from and forces everyone to have IE installed and unfortunately most users don't understand what a browser is to fix this.

And this is the reason web developers had nightmares with IE6 in the past and some still have with IE7.
Product Evangelist exclusively for US schools at HackerRank (Mountain View)
Every hacker has a type of challenge presented in a certain level of difficulty that really intrigues him/her. We're working to build the largest and the most engaging community of hackers.

HackerRank club
Every school should have a HackerRank club where we'll host hackathons, programming contests, lectures by eminent hackers, etc. I think only Apple and to an extent Google/Microsoft have been able to create and leverage their presence in the form of clubs. We want to be right up there.

We'll have budget for you to distribute some swag and prizes to the coding contests but there's a bigger picture in play. This is not really a recruitment tool but HackerRank will be a symbol of pride and a tool to learn.

<Job Responsibilities>

-- Create a HackerRank club across all schools in US

-- Conduct frequent editions of HackerGames (games.hackerrank.com), stanvscal and any other fun event you can think of

-- Be on top of a well-connected network of hackers and the ability to manage them.

-- Interact with academia/PhD’s in different areas of Computer science to source interesting challenges

-- Conduct hackathons and organize intra/inter-company contests (Eg: harman.hackerrank.com)

<Skills and Experience you Possess>

-- Hustling ability

-- Great communication (and convincing) skills

-- Basic knowledge of Computer Science

-- Ability to interact with engineers and have a rough idea of how things work. For eg: fixing a bug in IE might take twice the time to build a feature.

If this sounds interesting e-mail us at hackers [at] hackerrank.com with the biggest hack you've done (can be anything you did to get around something) and the biggest failure you've faced till now. Let's talk.
Spotify Is Having A Good 2012: Revenues Could Reach $500M
I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there.

The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they buy "televisions." Think about that for a minute.

The bulk of the market are entertainment 'consumers' for which you can sell access to their eyeballs for real money. Just like TV did before people got digital recorders and started skipping all the ads. Not so with these new fangled TVs, they don't care if you don't look at their advertising they want to know what you did look at, and when, and after what, and then what did you do? Because all of that is much more valuable than putting up a tasty picture of a cheeseburger in front of you, no, they can phone ahead to your local market and tell them to stock up on cheeseburgers because you've been researching them all day and are now at the point where you want to make a purchase.

But the cool thing? It means that the current 'big' players are leaving the market for computers behind. You can tell that by the fact that the computer company no longer sells a product that a developer would care to use. And that means that there is room again at the bottom.

Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on, hardware designed from the ground up to be developed on, open systems so that folks can easily work with it, and a team dedicated to making sure integration and support is there so that folks like you and I can say "Hey this audio doesn't work when you set the sampling rate to 40Khz" and they can fix it and release that fix.

But for that company to exist, you have to pay for the products you use, and to get to that point you have to not be able to get something 'good enough' by hacking and slashing something else into shape.
Radical new model: charge money in return for services. I'd gladly pay Google a nontrivial amount of money each month if it meant I could search and use Gmail without having to worry about them amassing enough personal information to predict the time and location of my bowel movements.
Yeah, I think that's a major deterrent. Thank you for the comment.
Android and iOS Soon Available with Microsoft Office | My Gadget Club
Microsoft shouldn't bundle multiple browsers. Now, I can see your point that they don't exactly provide others (except in the EU)... but I'm not sure this is really such a bad thing.
There are other perspectives, though. I've been on a Linux desktop almost exclusively for 19 years now. I continue to be amazed at the amount of spammy crap I have to put up with on my phone and tablet (running CM10 and stock 4.0.2 respectively, so it's not like I'm beholden to a manufacturer). Seems like every game wants to tell me about new features in the status bar every day. All the online services want to connect me to all the others. Every day or so some app has an "upgrade" available that inexplicably needs new permissions authorized. And frankly it seems to be getting worse.

And my desktop distro just goes on, doing what it's supposed to do, year after year.
Ah yes, that would be it. Thanks! Sad I so totally mangled that name.
Everyone bumps into this at some time on their journey through Python, however personally it's not something I've contended with in years and there is good reason for that:

> Suppose you have a function which takes a person and allows you to update the person's name, age, both, or neither

The problem is not the lack of some fundamental feature, it is one of obviousness in interface design. A trixy interface as given by the example leads exactly to the kind of problems the library hopes to eliminate. Instead how about:

def update(person, attrs):
pass

def update_with_email(person, attrs):
update(person, attrs)
send_email(person)

Not only is the problem avoided, but a problem of namespace pollution has been fixed too. Overusing keyword arguments in a hyper-generic manner forces extension of the code to require definition of a new function in order to avoid potential breakage.

For example, how does one add a 'use_html=True' parameter to update_with_email()? Perhaps by adding a 'use_html' kwarg that hopefully doesn't conflict with Person's attribute namespace, or perhaps by adding '_use_html', hoping to skirt the problem by introduction of ugliness. For a 'clean' backwards-compatible solution, we're forced into something like:

def _real_update_with_email(person, use_html, kwargs):
update(person, **kwargs)
send_email(person, use_html=use_html)

def update_with_email(person, **kwargs):
_real_update_with_email(person, False, kwargs)

def update_with_html_email(person, **kwargs):
_real_update_with_email(person, True, kwargs)

How can the caller dynamically form the attribute names if they need to?

# TODO: something seems terribly wrong here, I can't quite put my finger on it.
update(person, **{'previous_' + attr: value})

etc.

I realize abuse of \* \* is very much a religious issue, and at first sight, one of the superficial attractions to Python (at least for me, way back in time), however with experience it seems to regularly introduce more problems than it solves outside a few niche uses. The idea of adding an 'undefined' value has been discussed going back years (try grepping python-ideas and python-dev) and it's never made it in for good reason.

There is one place where an 'undefined' might seem useful at first, for example in the implementation of `dict.pop()` where a missing second argument signals the need to raise KeyError. The problem is that no published, public value including 'undefined' can be used as placeholder without introducing another ugly rule to the language: the ability to use `pop(..., default)` with any default value except 'undefined'! (net simplicity gain: zero)
Breaking a Language Barrier the Agile Way
I visit hundreds of websites every week, not just Google. Would that mean I have to pay them all "nontrivial" amounts of money? The internet is largely ad-supported; you're talking about a (admittedly) radical shift in the _entire_ internet ecosystem. Kind of audacious, no?
What Does Lean Mean for Software Testing?
At one point Sony offered a $50 fee to get your new PC with a "fresh" install. Unfortunately that was a tough sell from a marketing perspective.
If everyone got one of these, websites would just change a bit of code, and ads would work again. Thankfully, most people find advertising a useful part of their lives - adblock usage is still something like 1% of users.

blocking ads is as ridiculous as trying to block porn.

Ever tried getting past adblock? It's very trivial.

Also I'm not convinced this method of removing ads would work on ads served over https, where they can't inspect the traffic.
Regarding nil references, I now always think of this Sir Charles Antony Hoare quote when the topic arises:

"I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. In recent years, a number of program analysers like PREfix and PREfast in Microsoft have been used to check references, and give warnings if there is a risk they may be non-null. More recent programming languages like Spec# have introduced declarations for non-null references. This is the solution, which I rejected in 1965."
At home I have a cable modem attached to my d-link WAP/router.

24/7 I have a verizon MIFI device as a hotspot for work.

I have been wanting an in-line wire filter for a long time. While I am not concerned with ads as much, I'd love an inline wire FW that would be configurable.
yy
Copies the current selection, or, if there is no selection, the current line

Nope, if you've already selected something that's going to leave you in the one-y-received-now-please-indicate-the-object-you-want-to-yank state. It's absolutely critical to understand the verb-object grammar of Vim, and understand how visual mode interacts with that. Don't memorize permutations of y, just memorize how to move, and the fact that y yanks. </rant>
>This is nonsense fanboism
I'm not a fanboy, I didn't mention apple or anything else, I used ubuntu for a long time and it doesn't have this kind of problems.
Designing JS promises (2011)
This problem also happens in the context of HTTP PATCH, and you can solve it in the same way. Make update accept a single argument (a dict), and don't supply any keys you don't want to overwrite.
Microsoft got the message and their retail stores only sell computers as "Microsoft Signature", i.e. no crapware.

http://signature.microsoft.com/
Follow up post: http://architects.dzone.com/articles/scaling-scala-vs-java