skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With regards to density, San Jose has a density of 5,256 people per square mile. In contrast, Denver (which has an awesome train/bus system) has a density of 3,698 people per square mile.

If low density is why San Jose can't support a decent transit infrastructure, then how can Denver do it with even less density?
My friend who came from Tokyo says the transit here (bay area) is horrible. She states that you can't get anywhere you like and the scheduling system isn't always on time. In Japan, people rarely drive because the public system is everywhere and very efficient. You get a train every 5 minutes so you don't have to wait 30 minutes just for your ride.

If VTA (being in the center of the valley) implements some sort of GPS tracker on their trains, I think it give people a better idea when to head for the train station.
Are we talking about the implementation is patented? Or the algorithm itself is patented?

You can't patent an algorithm, at least not in the U.S. The expression of an algorithm can be patented. Patent lawyers often tell people to replace an algorithm with a system, which is an expression of the algorithm.
Thanks for catching the ps aux and for the refinements! Deploying new version now...
Well, I'm against software patents pretty much as much as anyone here, as you can verify from my comment history, but describing the mathematics of an array isn't the same as the array itself. The patent isn't violated until you start executing that mathematics of a Judy Array on a running computer. Otherwise, you could violate a patent by just talking about it.
Am I the only one who stop reading it as soon as I noticed that the author confuses the Web with the Internet?
Yes, exactly this. I didn't intend for my comment to be read as saying we can now forget about positive effect of wealth.
The next generation of hackers will certainly be working one abstraction level up.

Most likely they will do creative stuff involving grabbing some remote VMs and building systems where the underlying computer is not so relevant.

Trying to fit all media and information into one giant walled garden would be far too challenging for a single entity.
I can see how you can land in trouble as a pirate when you travel to a country with longer copyright. For Canadians, Hemingway for example is already public domain. Would a Canadian travelling with a Kindle full of Project Guttenberg downloads of Hemingway land in trouble with the US, EU or other customs ?

It would be in the publishers interest to obtain a few scary convictions for the chilling effect. I could see how auditing software would become useful: software that would tell you what content to take off your iPod when travelling to a certain country. Such software would need an accurate database of copyright status for each content in each country. I predict an open source source database of this type will be created in the future.
Even on the net, people prefer live radio over podcasts, says TuneIn CEO
Because the creations are presumably so good that will remain valuable long after the authors or any kin they'd personally care about are dead.
So much for editor independence.
Much of the regulation was created for good reason but it is hard to argue that there aren't a lot of regulation that is merely special interest to prevent competition or grant special favor.

Rather than more regulation, perhaps more transparency is a better solution. 3rd party certification would do a much better job at security than a government regulation. And have much less abuse and overhead.
You can't blame Silicon Valley for what is the idiocy of various levels of governments.

When I first came to the Bay Area, it took me an inordinately amount of time to realize that the BART didn't go all the way around the Bay. I just assumed that it did because it's what made the most sense.

In fact, the county of San Mateo voted against BART because they didn't want people from other counties to come and take their jobs. So, because of this, you have a ridiculous patchwork and mishmash of transit "solutions" from various levels of government, none of them really working well. If you had a BART that went around the Bay, you could eliminate Caltrain completely, and move that money into making BART even better. Of course, those are at different levels of government, which means that you couldn't really do that.

It's at the point now where, except for people that take Caltrain during rush hour, and MUNI in SF, most public transit around the Bay is for poor people. Most people with higher paying jobs can't afford how slow public transit is, and it creates this negative feedback loop where they don't get enough funding to justify a better schedule, etc.

Yes, Google has a great bus system that is a competitive advantage when it comes to hiring people. But this is private transit, and it doesn't directly translate to public transit. If you have to service an area like the South Bay, you have to not only service the areas that people need, but then you have to deal with unions, costs, etc.
Well first I would argue that modern copyright law is Unconstitutional and eventually it will go to the Supreme Court and will be struck down. Then we'll be back to the original copyright laws.

As for the justification of piracy, I suppose it is some form of protest? Instead of paying for copyrighted materials, just pirate them in protest of unfair and Unconstitutional copyright laws? Wouldn't it just be better to do a boycott of organizations that lobbied government to pass such laws and only buy from organizations that oppose those laws? Not only that but there is enough free and open source software, media, and ebooks and materials that ones doesn't need to buy the commercial copyrighted stuff anymore and still not pay much.

Stuff older than 20 years still gets pirated, old DOS apps, old 8 bit computer ROMs and Disk files for emulators, old movies and TV shows. Most of the older stuff lacks DRM malware and runs really fast as compared to the modern stuff that is bloated with rootkits and phone-home activation code checkers.
For those answering this: when answering, consider this post by patio on the recent rails vulnerability: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5035886

"[...]when this was announced I pushed the Big Red Button and pushed three emergency patches to my servers at 3 to 5 AM Japan time. My perception was "This just can't wait." I went to sleep with the vague feeling that I had probably broken something (there's always something that slips when you're tired and hasty) but that it was almost certainly acceptable given the alternative. [...]"

I know that was not about the machine you own, but frankly, does it matter whether you own or rent a box and whether it is in your or in somebody else's server room? In both cases, it is about third parties with the power to (partially) disable the code you run.
Thanks! I've updated that with your version, much MUCH more concise. (Also fixed the df thing, definitely copy paste error!)
Despite the limited life experience of some Chicagoans and New Yorkers who have not left their enclaves and thus have come to think they are the center of the world, these cities are not actually "most of the rest of the country", as I said.

Perhaps their citizens can not emerge from their bubbles far enough to believe it, but it's true.

The bay has regular bus service, sidewalks and bike lanes. Also trains. If you drive, you can do so from one place to another and find a parking place.

As someone who doesn't like to deal with cars, when I lived there it was very nice compared to the rest of the country, at least the 30 or so cities and towns I have lived in and the few hundred that I have stayed in for more than a few days, most of which it was extremely troublesome to get about without a car, and unlike San Francisco.
Massaging a contacts CSV into something GMail Contacts can import
You're saying the description of how a windmill works is not a description of a windmill, while the description of how the array works is a array.

How is that true? Isn't a description a model [1], never the thing itself?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_model
Try out the puzzles at the end, it's lots of fun.
I sympathise with you but (a) none of this matters in context; you still have to fix immediately or pull the plug and (b) you are deluding yourself if you think a flaw that 5 teams found independently the day the last SQLI advisory was released wasn't going to be in Metasploit within 7 days. This bug was too damn blatant.

I don't know why people weren't taking a hard look at the params processing code path in Rails for 6 years, but they clearly weren't. The SQLI bug from last week pointed people at that code, it got its first real shake, and that's all there is to say about it.
What's being exploited is an insecure API. Can you explain how this is different than finding a bug in a browser's JS implementation, or finding a kernel bug that lets you perform local escalation of privilege?
Could you elaborate on exactly what you are restricted and locked out from?
After Android changed from being Blackberry-like to being iPhone-like, Eric Schmidt stopped attending Apple board meetings where the iPhone was discussed due to conflicts of interest.

I'm sure that this is where Steve Jobs' "Android is stolen" idea comes from.
I have an iPad and love it, but haven't bought a single app for it. Sure I use some free apps, bit what is the single most used app? Safari, for, wait for it, browsing the web.

It will be interesting to see how today's kids get into content generation with less keyboard experience and I do believe that tablets will rose over huge chunks of the internet user experience--it is just too easy to consume content using one.

But the end the open web of google and web search? And the rise of the special purpose app for everything? I don't think so. Not as long as tablets ship with standards compliant browsers.
Because releasing it into the public domain would benefit people more than it hurts Disney?

That's not the right question to ask anyway. Copyright only exists insomuch as government grants it - thus they can take it away if they please, or after an arbitrary duration. You should really ask how long is reasonable for a creator's work to be protected, and just how many generations of his descendants should inherit that right.
The topic is misleading. "Light rail" != "Transit".

Light rail sucks, no argue about that.
Buses are pretty good. Caltrain is decent. But in such a low density area it's hard to expect something good out of public transportation.
Coming from NYC, the Valley is the suburbs, and suburbs with public transportation don't go together well. People are so spread out, which means the public transport is spread out, which means the utilization rate is lower and not very cost effective like it is in dense urban areas. The valley would have to re-designed.. but yea that isn't happening.
Why can't the same be said of self-improving AIs? This seems to me like the sort of awesome-sounding but unsupported assertion that leads people to roll their eyes at the Singularity crowd.
Stupid is not winning (apart from alttab's keen observation).
I was actually pretty upset because I thought that might have been what the Rails team was trying to do --- to come up with an occlusive patch, like you're advocating. Because that plan was. not. going. to. work. When multiple teams flag the same RCE on the same day, the only reasonable conclusion to come to is that the cat is out of the bag.

What needed to happen is what happened: a patch and a series of workarounds were produced as soon as possible.

Nobody got to choreograph this one. The control you think the Rails team had over this, they did not have.
Demystifying Mentoring
"How about instead of criticizing people's eductions, we encourage them to be mindful about what they don't know, and to learn whatever they can when they get a chance?"
I'm all for people learning things they were not taught in school and I commend you for that.

But as the field grows there will be more and more material that was traditionally taught, but is now dropped. For example, I could imagine a misguided department dropping a once required OS/Systems class to allow students to choose that as an elective, or maybe a node.js or Ruby elective instead. I think those kind of program changes are serious and need discussion-
You can use TCP/UDP/GRE for your traceroute packets with the -P switch:

traceroute -P udp <hostname>

This is super useful if you're probing a network that's hostile to ICMP packets - it's a lot more reliable than ICMP in many scenarios, from my experience.
I was looking through old computer magazines from the 1980s and thinking about my youth when there were numerous incompatible microcomputer platforms that had some popularity at some point such as

* TRS-80 Models I and III
* VIC 20, C-64, C-128
* Apple II, II+, IIe, ...
* CP/M systems based on the S-100 bus
* IBM PC

and way too many others to mention. Eventually the PC and the Mac won out, except for a few Amiga fanatics and a specialized "workstation" marked served by vendors like Sun.

It seems the current state of things isn't nearly as fragmented as that!
I thought the same thing too… I only read "Apple blocks Java 7…"

The "…Mac Plugin" part was completely lost in my skimming.
Fox 18 on XP here and I can't get anything to work, either. Mouse scrollwheel, spacebar, arrow keys all do nothing.

In addition, I don't know if you're using any light gray for visual cues. That's a problem. My screen is crap with shot contrast and light gray tends to become white that I can't see. I wish to hell everyone would stop using light gray everywhere.
I'm the author of this cheatsheet and I have no clue really. Just wanted to try the word out, see if it felt right.

But yes, my impression is that it's normally a developer who "trends towards doing systems administration" – so someone who knows the codebase, but can provision and wrangle servers. So, someone like me (I write full stack apps, but my "speciality" is the server end of things).
Seriously! The term is becoming useless when it's just a synonym for 'sysadmin' or 'random linux cruft'
If you're going to implement full-page scrolling, the animation should go sideways, like it does in a book. That way there is less opportunity to mix up the bottom of page 2 with the top of page 1.
From what I've seen software patents seems to be mostly trivial math.
Sorry about that! I didn't submit the link otherwise I would have mentioned it.

Though...the only way it's really "rails focused" is that the commands are collected over time and sourced from my fellow rails developer/sysadmins. A lot of these are basic/general linux commands.
I love my MBA but am due for an 8GB one. I'd be open to dual booting into Ubuntu. There's not much I need from any OS anymore that I can think of, it would be an interesting experiment.
I was able to get my java-applet-based VPN working again by temporarily re-enabling Apple's Java SE 6 applet plugin: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5559
Unless I misunderstand what Silicon Valley is, I would argue that I can blame a region for its government. Your argument sounds like "You can't blame Oklahoma for their low education standards.".
i will blame the headline there. is it now mandatory for every headline to be either none, all, always, never, best or worst?

headline aside, nice article, like "collaboration is the winning strategy — fear is the innovation-killer"
That line made me wonder if the whole article was a parody. I'm still not sure.
Punditry at its worst. I would have called it clueless, but the truth is that nobody knows, and given evidence, this does not even seem like a plausible prediction.

Sure you can say "mobiles apps grew so and so". But then I can say that given the growth of a newborn child, 60 years old adult should be 50m tall.
Thanks, this is great stuff! I have a developer account registered as an individual. Does that mean that I can still charge/add ads, as long as I provide my own personal banking and tax information?

Also, yeah, I have no illusions about making a ton of money from this app. It's mostly just something I started putting together while I was learning iOS, and then kept polishing once I was comfortable with iOS because I liked the idea. If I can't get the money stuff squared away I'll probably put it up for free anyway; I just figured that if I'm gonna release it to the world I might as well see if I can get some beer money for doing so.
I wrote some code a little while ago to do something like this (although I wasn't trying to produce Victory Boogie Woogie in particular)[1]. It generates samples from a probability distribution over kd-trees called the Mondrian Process [2]

[1] http://whatididonthetrain.blogspot.com/2011/02/mondrian-was-...

[2] http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~teh/research/npbayes/RoyTeh2009a....
Patents tend to be written like "any system that implements algorithm X" and "any machine-readable medium containing software that implements algorithm X", which is equivalent to a patent on the algorithm itself.
> You say that like it's an epic conquest to learn Rails.
> [...] there's also plenty who have taken the weekend or so it takes to get a good working knowledge of Rails.

It is a fair enough conquest to learn Rails the proper way, knowing exactly what is happening under the hood.
Rails productivity doesn't come from how easy it is to generate some pre-built basic controllers or models without knowing what is involved, Rails productivity comes from how well it is engineered and connected in the whole picture. In fact, all Rails pro's will tell you that they have stopped using those "automagical features that make productivy fast" as soon as they were able to understand what they were doing, for the sake of more granular customization.
So, in 2 words, you won't have a good working knowledge of Rails in a week-end, expecially if you don't know ruby. You'll just learn to use some "generators".

> If a language or framework has major security holes, it should
> fail in the marketplace

It should in a perfect world designed by an IT professional which fortunately it isn't.
It will not in reality, and fortunately we have plenty of cases for this.

> I'm going to assume it's a troll post. After all, when I see your username I can't help but imagine [...]

You have a poor imagination.
Thanks! You are completely right. Just basic sysadmin stuff. It's titled that way simply a) I thought I'd see if I could hang with the term and b) the "source" of these commands (including myself) are from developers who specialize in rails ops work (so we do write app code, but specialize on the server side)
Mis-labeling a Remote Code Execution vulnerability as SQL-I is absolutely downplaying the severity. SQL-I is a bad finding, RCE is tantamount to the worst thing you could possibly find in an application.

There were people on this very site who were commenting about whether they should concern themselves with this patch (initially because people erroneously attributed the vuln to SQL-I, and then later because they "weren't using XML anyway")

Those kinds of things happen when you don't clearly describe what a vulnerability is, and when you try to mask how big of a deal something is.

This was a huge vulnerability. It was critically important that everyone running a Rails app fix it immediately. Shouting that from the rooftops was absolutely the right approach. Cloak and Dagger bullshit to try and hide that is unequivocally a bad idea.
They are also OK with Apple stopping other people from running code on their machines.
>>I thought it then to be weird at best for a city to run light rail on a sidewalk where pedestrians normally are

It works this way in Amsterdam. Bicycles, pedestrians (many of them stoned tourists), cars and trains all mixing together peacefully and efficiently. Europe in general makes the US look like a complete joke where trains are concerned.
Thanks for the entirely pedantic and useless correction. Assuredly you have heard "spam" used colloquially to refer to unwanted messages, and not just the narrow definition of "unsolicited bulk" email.

Have a nice day.
That's pretty sweet. If anybody is having trouble getting it to work in KDE, I found that these instructions were necessary: https://wiki.edubuntu.org/ComposeKey#Persistent_Configuratio...
This was an interesting read that raises many questions, but much of the analysis is ultimately flawed because the author confuses many concepts.

Internet is not a human-computer interface. It is true that most native apps, non-browser apps on mobile and tablets use touch as the main point of interaction. And it is true that many people browse web via http or https using a keyboard and a mouse. But who knows how this will change in the future? People change. Web standards converges and diverges constantly. Technology evolves. Browsers today already do unthinkable things. There's no reason to completely assume that the primary HCI of web will remain as keyboard and mouse. Nor should we completely assume that the touch interface on tablets are the be it and end all method of interacting with native apps.
Chauncey Jerome
What if you really want to achieve something that will naturaly take about 10 years?

Surely somewhere during that time you'll concurrently have other, less important, objectives.
Not trying to start a flame war, but I am on the tabs side of the discussion. Most companies have rules about tabs/spaces (we use spaces, much to my chagrin), and it's pretty easy to set a rule.

I code in Go a lot now, and Go ships with gofmt, which formats your code for you (uses tabs by default). There are similar tools for every language I've used. This can be set in a pre-commit hook (or whatever the terminology is for non-git scms), so it's not really an issue. We do this, and it works like a champ.
Apple has blocked only Java applet browser plugin from Safari. Java can still be run on OS X.
It would be really great if F.lux would also adjust for local cloud cover. Sun is out - screen is bright, it's cloudy - screen dims. has anyone else noticed that the pointer in windows dosen't dim?
Our founding fathers wanted to encourage competition and innovation. Copyright was given as a temporary protection of works for the owner, and after a certain amount of time the copyright fell into the public domain and then anyone could use it for free. This allowed small businesses and individuals to be able to compete with the copyright holder, and encourage the copyright holder to keep innovating new copyrights as the old ones expired.

But with the current system, copyrights never expire, and copyright holders don't innovate like they used to do. As a result our economy has gotten worse, and unemployment keeps going up, and the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is denied.

The US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 has been violated by these modern copyright laws.

And I quote:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Microsoft used Ecma as a standards repository, not a standards body. Ecma neither created nor endorsed C# - they received and recorded a standards submission from Microsoft thus making C# "Microsoft tech."

Finally, neither C# 3.0, 4.0 or 5.0 have been submitted to Ecma. So we can hardly refer to C# as an Ecma language for crying out loud! :)
In fairness, while I'm specifically not a fan of that Phusion post, it was referring to a bug that wasn't an RCE.
Unfortunately, the copyright terms have nothing to do with whether you can actually use the algorithm/datastructure. It only means you can copy the source-code of a particular implementation of the algorithm/datastructure under the terms of the LGPL. If you want to actually run the code on a computer then you must contend with whatever enforcement or non-enforcement mechanism the author has in place for the patent.
What the hell is wrong with their capital letters? This is terrible to read.