skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm quite surprised that panopticlick says I'm uniquely identifiable with Chrome based solely on the browser plugins reported, even though the ones I have are quite pedestrian: just Chrome PDF viewer, QuickTime, PepperFlash, and Flash.

In Firefox, the plugins get them to 1 in 860,000 which leaves only 3 possibilities in their DB of 2.5 mln, even though Firefox loads only QuickTime and Flash.

It must be the combination of codecs I have installed. How do I go about cleaning that up?
> When most people argue over what is "art", they actually intend to be arguing over what is good art.

No. When I argue over what "art" means, I intend to argue about what "art" means.

> "Art" is just a descriptor that can be given to any noun at the discretion of any observer.

According to you.

My definition is much closer to the dictionary definition:

the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

I'm not a hater; I like lots of modern art, conceptual stuff, etc.

...but that doesn't mean that there are just two positions here: hidebound classicists and utterly-loosey-goosey "the manner in which I took a shower this morning was ART" hippies.

I can be open-minded about art and still think that " "Art" is just a descriptor that can be given to any noun at the discretion of any observer. " is nonsense.
Mike, Thanks for the feedback (I've read nearly every article on your site). I'll definitely try out some different layouts for the packages. I wanted to see what affect flipping the package order would have.
I wonder if it's the same genius who tried to hack WP[0] or if we've got a copycat on our hands.

[0] https://github.com/maxymax/WordPress/commit/2fa93590c7881fab...
LOL! Genius.

(and, sadly, true)
Yes. Wikipedia is fundamentally broken. As a Wikipedia admin since 2003, trying to make basic, intelligent changes to articles that are 'protected' of late has just baffled me. It is very sad that this has occurred to what was previously a strong community. The notion of 'notability' is basically obsolete in these internet days, and should be dropped from Wikipedia's (many and spurious) policies. People that spend their days deleting others' contributions should have to write three times as much accredited content to delete something.
International Startup Festival Brings New Meaning to Elevator Pitch
I got the newsletter via email and headed to buy the book where I reacted same as the majority of commenters on HN.
After checking the options/prices, I am going to put that on hold for now. Good luck though, I am sure you've put a lot of effort into this.

For HN users who are wondering about the author, I came across this: http://sachagreif.com/how-nathan-barry-and-i-sold-39k-worth-...
Video presentation of my session on Mobile DevOps at MoDevEast 2012
I'm never sure what to think about these articles. I've been seeing these since I was a kid (20 years ago), and yet, U.S. adults seem to do fine; the U.S. continues to be a hotbed of innovation. Not only is SV an unrivaled center of gravity for CS/EE type innovation, the U.S. also has world class ME, ChemE, biotech, etc. innovation.

Furthermore, U.S. students seem to do fine on exams that require creativity (IMO, Putnam, etc.).

If you want to dig into the data itself, there's a passable interface to it here: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/

A large part of the "problem" seems to be because we're comparing a very large country to much smaller nation-states. Massachusetts outperforms almost the entire world [1]. Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a well-known problem. It is, for example, the reason the Gates Foundation erroneously spent $1 billion funding small schools [2]. It's a reasonable thing to think about doing, because small schools outperform large schools. But, small schools aren't only at the top, they're at the bottom, too! Small schools have higher variance. Small countries do, too.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pd...

[2] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the...
What do you think the world is waiting for, and what are these better desktop tools?
Digital data to double every 2 years through 2020
Discouragement is your (at least, my) biggest bugbear with this. You have to keep it fun. Become close friends with the REPL, rather than spending 8 hours (that's a week for a typical side project) setting up an IDE that looks like a corporate environment you won't need.

You're (usually) not going to accomplish much, macroscopically, until you've done a fair amount of ground work (e.g. learning APIs). You need to keep that ground work fun, so whatever structure you impose on the process (to-do lists) needs to be focused on improving this factor.
And that's more of a reason not to execute code from them isn't it?
I agree. But in all code that I write, regardless of pretty much whatever language it's written in, I always explicitly add parentheses around what I want the order of operations to be.

"1 * 3 + 4 / 20 && foo" is unreadable. No one wants to memorize the order of operations for every language they use and have to figure it out in their head. Make life easier for the people who have to maintain that line of code you just wrote.
Let's Solve the File Format Problem
that is amazing. I assumed ipython was just another interactive shell - I will be using notebooks to collate my thoughts forever now! (indeed, it sounds like I could now do most of my development off a chromebook and a cloud server.)

edit: for clarification, I saw this comment, and three hours later I'm back to reply.
A better title might not include puerile memes like "Protip".
This seems to written for penetration testers who are actually paid to "hack into places" and have the consent of the system owner therefor are not breaking the law.
The SOOMLA Project is an open framework for virtual economies. SOOMLA allows game developers to save time and effort by using conventions instead of configuration. The open source SDKs are coming with a designer tool that boosts the setup process and allows to create a fully functional in-game store that can be easily integrated into the game.
Please don't twist it to make them appear safe for voting purposes. They are not.

With today's computers that have any non-trivial piece of code on them it is for all practical purposes unpredictable that they will carry out the task that they are supposed to do, even if every piece of code is known.

The task at hand it "perform a universal, secret, equal and verifiable vote without any fraud involved". I doubt that this can ever be achieved.

If even a small sub-task of this is violated, I consider that such that it didn't carry out the task.
I'm actually not parsing the HTML at all. Not really. I'm using PhantomJS, which is a headless web browser. Each time I load a page, I inject jQuery and just do a simple JS command like

$('#whatevertheIDisfortheform').submit();

It's the equivalent of opening up your console on each page and interacting with it via jQuery rather than a mouse and keyboard.
Yes, I have my own domain and have been doing this for years. It generally works as expected, and so far I've had at least four unique addresses that were leaked to spammers. One of them was the address I used for newegg.

If you do go this route, I'd recommend using a whitelisting approach. I do get a lot of spam sent to random addresses at my domain.
Perhaps you'd be better splitting it in to two projects: client and server. That way you can easily add support for other languages.

Personally, I'd love to see a Node version as I'm currently writing a (sort-of) CMS using node.js and angularjs, I've been looking for something to help with graphs on my dashboard and there's not much out there at the moment.
Wouldn't you just use nested documents in mongo though?
Seeing all these awesome projects makes me slightly depressed, everyone's building awesome interpreters and compilers, while I'm sitting here just working on <boring things>.
This change affects specific architectures, without regard to how they perform.
It's not even that complicated and you can do it with existing software. You can take the file into something like Audacity, band stop the range surrounding 50 Hz (or 60Hz in the US), and then simply mix in the prerecorded mains sound like you would do any other mixing.

It's not necessary to mix in the frequency domain because mixing in the frequency domain is mathematically equivalent to mixing in the time domain (FFT(x + y) = FFT(x) + FFT(y)).
Sent from your iPhone
Tangentially related, I've suffered a quiet death of my own BBS history because nearly a decade of 90's data is jailed on old 250MB+ QIC tape backups that were recorded with various unknown programs running from DOS to Win 3.1/95 days. Has anyone had a positive experience with using a service to migrate data from media this old and unknown backup programs at a reasonable cost?
My first, gut reaction was this was a very pretentious-sounding letter from some singularly pretentious people. It's probably got a lot to do with the fact that I hate TED.

I can't articulate exactly what it is about TED that bothers me so much. I know it has to do with the attitude. South Park got pretty close to the mark in their episode about hybrid cars and San Francisco - a bunch of self-righteous people sniffing their own farts.

With that as my context, this letter read like a pompous bureaucrat windbag going on about how great he is and how important all his rules and policies are. I want to say, get over yourself. TED isn't that good.
I'm don't get paid to do this sort of thing very often, but when I have been paid, the client has always asked for noisy generic scans that can be integrated as part of a periodic review process (for internal or external parties). Explaining that the bad guys won't be so nice as to light up your IDS with an internal portscan or try to brute force some random database was met with complete indifference.

I guess as someone who would be responsible for their network's general well-being, I'd probably rather have some checked boxes saying nothing on my internal network was listening with trivially exploitable (i.e. non-patched or badly configured) services and my passwords are at least a certain complexity and not variations of the 1000 most common as of $SOMEDATE.

That said, it should be pretty easy to setup the usual suspects for scan tools to be performed in a scoped manner to satisfy the need for checked boxes after an operator spends some time getting up close and personal with the target system. Those type of attacks are going to reveal more information about user training (looking at Joe User with important\ passwords.docx in My\ Documents) than simple network scans are likely to.

I wonder what the qualifications are these days for a pen tester at a commerical company...
Yeah and biology killed a lot of things in the process. On a microscopic timescale we want to avoid doing that with our software.
So much for Microsoft's automatic Do Not Track. It seems users are less safe, not more with IE, from ad companies.
I'm a fan of whiteboarding. I have a bunch of headings for projects I'm working on, and under each of them I have a list of small tasks. Every time I sit down to work on a project, I pick one and a task and go at it.
I'm more shocked that they even allow images to be embedded in comments.
Prof. calls out student for cheating via Math StackExchange
are there any plans to open source this?
Curiosity’s Cousins: Autonomous Polar Robots Explore Earth’s Extremes
Nope, I'm using PhantomJS, a headless web browser that's mostly used for test automation. I programmed it to log in to the Amazon account, fill out the various forms, and buy/ship the stuff.
Ah, I thought perhaps this was going to be another link to this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910212
As beobab said, code, debug, feedback, rinse and repeat

Other resources that were helpful for me as well

Books:

- SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html)
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Courses:

- Almost all udacity CS classes
- SaaS courses at edx.org
- Scala course and most CS courses in coursera

Open source:

- browse most popular OS projects on GH, and try to contribute
- create your own open source project, and get feedback / pull requests

Q&A sites:

- Stackoverflow
- http://codereview.stackexchange.com

and of course most coding related articles here on HN

edit: SICP has an online course at MIT OCW:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

it might cover a lot of things you know, but I think it's a must have for every developer out there.
This is purely anecdotal, but it seems like kids are held back in the US primarily by the curriculum. I immigrated to the United States having grown up in a couple of commonwealth countries and I was shocked to go from a school where I had been learning basic trigonometry to a school where basic algebraic principles weren't even taught until the next year. So whenever I see a discussion about all the social issues that impact education, I have to roll my eyes and wander why people just aren't seeing the kids are capable of more. Thoughts?
It looks like all of the charts on that page end in about 2006. The last few years have been quite different. This report includes a comparison of percent change in per student spending in fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2008 in each state:

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3569

The majority of states have seen declines -- some quite significant.
I really can't stand longer lines, I think that this is a best practice for every code.
I usually work with the monitor splitted in two parts with maybe 2 different files in each half, long lines would make that really difficult to read.

Moreover if you need lines longer than 80 chars you're probably doing it the wrong way: long lines are difficult to understand
"... the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." but we can delete what we want.
Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and abbreviations.

Plus the big problem of sources curation, those are more unreliable in unpopular articles for the lack of eyeballs on them. The amount of work mods have to do would grow exponentially if they didn't take notability into account.

Of course Wikipedia could do better, but it is a hard problem, not an easy one.
Tangentially related, I've been wondering if that could affect current gender discrepancies in the entrepreneurial scene (prospect of paying 200-300% more for private health insurance than male counterparts makes it even harder to leave your day job). More female startup founders in 2014, maybe?
I sent my original 40 Mhz 386 that I used when hacking Linux 0.12 back in 1991 to be recycled last year, after it was displayed on exhibit at Linux's 20th year anniversary party. I tried to see if anyone (like the Computer Museum) wanted it, but ultimately, I'm not the nostalgic type either.
One of the things I like about France (as an Englishman living here) is that it's still normal for people to have a glass or two of wine at lunch. I think it's remained in the culture because most businesses give their staff two hours for lunch and subsidised meal tickets they can use at any participating restaurant (which is pretty much all of them). Who wouldn't have a glass or two in that setup? :)
That would be very expensive. Looks like at least $30 per copy.
For external interfaces I don't see a need to avoid portscans - they're popular enough on the open internet that it's not going to attract attention or deviate much from standard traffic.
I appreciate the reply. I will definitely be looking into screen reflection issues and I think you may be right about the florescent lights too. I"m moving to a new "cooler" office soon so hopefully I can make sure we have incandescent bulbs in there. I may email you about configuring software, but I can probably get it. I definitely need to switch to a dark theme for my IDE
Right, I should have clarified.

Good head chefs are scarce. In a high-class restaurant, their pay should be comfortable with or without tips. The rest of the kitchen staff might rely on tips (though I'm not sure if it's legal to pay them less than minimum wage like waiters), but relative to the waiter they each have little interaction with the customer and hence comparatively little ability to influence the tip.
If these scrapers abide by robots.txt (you do have a robots.txt, right?) and scrape only whatever you left publicly accessible, then I think you should work on your server performance, because if a scraper causes problems, you'll have much worse problems once whatever you've built becomes popular.

Hunting down bots is a waste of time and effort better spent elsewhere.
It appears to me that Wikipedia needs to come up with a measure of notability for each article - NotabilityRank if you will.

An arbitrary watermark is bound to cause all sorts of issues
How much of that innovation and world-class industry is created from immigrants? The business-friendly policies of the United States can be thanked too, but those business run on the labor of immigrants.
Good counterexample.
Are we putting too much faith in the cloud
Work on an awesome interpreter or compiler then?
Allow? They just released a feature that lets you drag and drop images into comments — it automatically uploads to s3 and inserts the URL in your comment. For some reason, they encourage it.
Huh, our testing shows Alchemy beating out Salience in sentiment, named entities, and several other areas. I don't even see stuff like relations extraction in Salience. wht are you basing your eval on?
They desalinate like there's no tomorrow. Like so many other things there, it's insanely expensive, but they do it anyway.

UAE is also enroute to building its first nuclear power plant, but it's not what's powering desalination at this point.
It's useful when there's something wrong with the UI, you can attach a screenshot. Emoticons on the other hand are pretty annoying.
Big Frame | Lead Full Stack Engineer | Los Angeles, CA

Big Frame is looking for an experienced full stack engineer to lead the development of our client-facing product. The Lead Engineer will be a talented technologist who loves to create things and has demonstrated experience building professional-grade software from the ground up. You will be one of the first technical employees of the company with big responsibilities and the opportunity to make a direct and visible impact on scaling the business.

You will:

Play a pivotal role in defining our technology stack; drive the development schedule and lead the implementation of our core product; build an in-house technical team while directing outsourced designers and developers; attract and develop engineering talent as we grow; be part of an awesome team in sunny Los Angeles (LA location is a must).

About Us

Big Frame is a growing media company representing some of the most prominent producers on YouTube. We provide marquee online talent with marketing and production resources to create original content and integrated marketing campaigns. We raised $3M+ earlier this year. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/big-frame

To Apply

View the full description and requirements at http://bigfra.me/jobs. Send us a brief note including your resume, LinkedIn and/or Github profile at jobs@bigfra.me.
Counting in Base 12, better?
The difference is that a computer can emulate any machine, and it might not be emulating the one you think it's emulating.
The best thing I ever do is shutdown tweetdeck, my e-mail client and any browser tabs to social networks / HNs / reddit. Productivity shoots up the roof.
Pull request might not be a terrible attack vector. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who don't look carefully and just merge them in.
This is just hyperbole to pry more tax dollars for education and I appreciate the sentiment behind it.

However, US is the driving engine of innovation and creativity and will continue being so. Asian societies prize conformity over creative thinking ; they are good at Math/whatever-subject because they are forced to be good at those subjects because proficiency in those subjects is seen as the ticket into middle class. In America, every kid has a choice to do whatever with his/her life. The American society nurtures its rebel thinker and lone wolf ; it prizes creativity over conformity. This choice gives us Beyonce, Vint Cerf ,Steve Jobs / Bill Gates , etc. etc.
Zeitgeist 2012 -> Germany -> Trending Car Brands

1. Opel
2. BMW
3. Audi
4. VM
5. Mercedes

...

4. VM ?? O_o
SciPy Superpack easily installs iPython, SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib, and others on OSX.
For OSX, I've used http://fonnesbeck.github.com/ScipySuperpack/ with no issues.
Please remove the Facebook, Mailchimp etc logos. It really leaves a bad taste - it's a practice to show those on a landing when either the companies whose logo are featured, are using this product/service or have said something positive about it.

But after reading the line below it, it's just a mis-direction, felt almost cheated. I'd highly recommend removing it.
Agreed. I'm no rubyist, but it's not only much more readable, but functionally easier to manage in code. I can easily comment out one or more blocks or methods in the chain in this case if need be, for example. I'm surprised they advocate it on one line, actually.
Kludgeocracy: the opacity of the state is important
Yowch.
Not a big fan, honestly. It looks like it was designed in 2006. This could definitely benefit from less striped backgrounds and more whitespace.
The Pragmatic Bookshelf Publishes a RubyMotion Book
Very bottom "So, are you ready to buy the book now?"

But no link/button/call to action - I'd need to scroll back up and parse out which action to take from the visual stuff above. Wondering if you'd see more conversions by putting a purchase link there too (or perhaps you've already tried it)
Well I'm here to say that you can break the shackles. At 37 I might still toil in the Java mines during the day, but at night I am learning Ruby, Rails, NoSQL, zsh and other Open Source/less than enterprisey stuff.

I might not be able to debug a rails app as fast as I can a JEE app but I can still grok/reason/solve issues on the platform.
> Now-a-days we have computers which can show more than 80 characters at a time

Of course we do. We also have serial ports that go way faster than 9600, so at last "ed" can be used to its full potential.
So was this a CMU student? :(
What is happening here? I am not very accustomed to open source yet.

Edit: un-checking "show inline notes" helps.

Edit 2: So if I understand correctly, OP tried to hack into a website... by submitting code to github. I was confused at first because that would have been (very) wrong way to "hack", but as it turns out, that is indeed true. And rest is about the code he/she used. It seems to be auto generated in some wysiwyg html editor that uses old html.
This is a dilemma for me. On one side:

Is it wrong to ask for help??
In the professional world, being able to communicate and collaborate in finding an answer is more usefuel than doing it all by your own.

On the other side:

If what you want to do is to develop in your brain the mental models to do math.
then you need to do your homework... is like triying to get in shape, it's ok to have a personal trainer but he can't lift weights for you.
Introducing HackerWeb
I assumed that was because of changes in Skitch. Everyone I know used to take screenshots with Skitch, upload them and Skitch would copy the URL into your clipboard and you could post into Github. But since Evernote bought them they closed things down and they're basically useless now, so I figured that was why Github was motivated to add this feature.