skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IPhone user hit with £19,000 Orange bill for 'excessive Internet usage
Xing buys Kununu
Great Service. Recently, however, we moved to basecamp because of the calendaring features.
Ha! It's funny since I literally just finally signed up this past week.

I saw it when it first came out and was blown away but didn't have time to fit it into my routine until recently. Really wonderful elegant software, I've gotten a few other people to convert to it too just in the past couple days.

I have boards for misc tasks, various engineering tasks, shopping, development, sales pipelines etc. It's fantastic.
This argument sounds reasonable. I wonder if it is true though. Businesses that are paid for their services can vanish as well. The question is, if the probability is really lower for paid services compared to free services.
I have no idea whether Google+ will succeed or fail.

I do know a strategy that would have made it succeed because, when I was at Google, I proposed it.
I didn't like the Aeron, but I think Embody is pretty great. Make sure you sit in the chairs. Herman Miller runs a bi-annual 15% off sale, one is around Thanksgiving.

My work chair is a Steelcase Leap
I'm with you on this. mv* Javascript frameworks just don't make a lot of sense on a primarily "document" (and I use that term loosely) based site, like Wikipedia. Things like backbone have their place, but it isn't on every site every made.
Ask HN: What are your favorite audio books?
Are there books that you would recommend that really suit the format?
Generally with Debian you only install once per machine, as upgrade always works. Its not like other distros where you pretty much have to wipe the drive and restore from backup, or OS like windows where a new MB requires so many new drivers you may as well wipe and replace. So any Debian box commissioned before 2007 or so will semi-eternally run i386, even if upgraded multiple times since then. Multi-arch is supposed to fix that.

I bit the bullet and wipe/install upgraded my home server circa 2009 but I've got plenty of new machines still stuck on i386.
US Immigration Fails Entrepreneurs Again
As someone who has semi-recently started getting back into programming, this is a big deal for me. Starting with Ruby (reading The Well Grounded Rubyist) -- I read the book, felt like I understood a lot of it well except some of the more advanced stuff, but was stumped when considering my own practice problems and how to solve them.

Providing small, challenging problems is a very valuable resource. I'm currently reading An Introduction to Programming in Java (as preparation for the Princeton Algorithms course on Coursera). While the book may not be the best Java book, each section has 40+ programming exercises. Sometimes the exercises are boring, but I do most of them anyway because they are in themselves a learning exercise.
So I gather Elop's MS options are about to vest soon :-)
Thieves stealing barcodes from pictures of event tickets posted on social media
> Step one: Corral every single blogger. Have you used Google lately and noticed faces appearing next to certain posts? That’s called Google Authorship--bloggers can link their Google Plus profile to the content they create. Guess how many online writers see that and say “Eh, I don’t need to have that.” If you said “zero” you win a prize.

False. I couldn't care less about a silly profile pic. I also don't even use Blogger. Perhaps the author is unaware, but there are quite a few bloggers out there who _aren't_ using Blogger, and who happen to control the ability to alter their blog at-will. This would include putting up silly profile pics or whatever.

> Step two: Attract every single small business and at least one of their employees. Want your business to appear on Google Maps, Google Local, et al., so that you can tell your prospective customers where you are, what you sell, and when you are open? Yup, you guessed it--you need a Google Plus Local Business page now.

False. You don't _need_ a "Google Plus Local Business page" for any of that, Google -- and, apparently, the author (who is playing the role of an agent of Google at this point) -- just wants you to believe that you do.

> Step three: Convince you, because all of those other things that you already love get better. Maybe you’re addicted to that new augmented reality game Ingress. Maybe your Google Plus profile makes it way easier to win. Or maybe you want better music, movie, or book recommendations--look no further than Google Plus. Want to find a community of skiers or chefs or race car drivers with a flick of the wrist? Or perhaps that hilarious video about that thing that you once emailed to a friend but can’t quite remember enough about it to find again? When you have Google Plus, those communities and that video just appear when you search for your best guess.

Could he be any more blatant with the Google advertising? I looked for a 'full disclosure' statement but couldn't find one, so I can only assume that the author is drunk on the kool-aid at this point. Regardless, somehow I'm still leading a meaningful, productive life without Google+. I don't know how, maybe I'm a freak of nature.....but I can still easily find music, movie and book recommendations without G+. Astonishingly, I can also still find meetups without G+. And G+ would be the last place I'd ever look to find an old video...

With that said, I'm not saying G+ has failed. But it's not for everyone, and the more Google attempts to force me down that path, the more I am going to resist.
Dynamic Newsletter Signup Form with jQuery Animations
If Valve makes their new platform the only way to play Half-Life 3... that might be the first game in the series that I'll have to skip. I hate to say that, because I don't doubt that it will be an awesome game, but it's just not enough to sell me on a whole new gaming platform.
I used firefox up until I ran into a nasty Javascript bug which caused Firebug to conk out, never hitting the breakpoint. I switched to Chrome and the breakpoint was hit every time. I got the overall impression that Firefox's debugging tools weren't as good as Chrome's. Has this changed at all?
>If the patent examiner finds prior art that the filer didn't disclose, automatic denial of patent and the filer's privilege to file is revoked for a limited period of time.

Revoking the ability to file is no real deterrent because they'll just file the next one under a different shell corporation. And you're falling into the "small inventor trap": "The little guy can't afford such a comprehensive search so you're excluding him from the patent system." (Never mind that the patent office is expected to do such a search for the amount of the filing fee.) That's the argument you'll get.

>That and outlawing non-practicing entities from holding patents would probably go a long way to fixing the situation, and might even have a chance of happening.

You have a much better chance of abolishing software patents than preventing trolls from holding patents in all industries -- the trolls are the main lobby for keeping software patents. The balance of major software companies is, if anything, probably somewhat against software patentability.
Business Lessons Learned for 2012
I fiddled with explosives a bit.

My father more than me.

My father once tried to make a "rocket" by filling some canisters with "solid fuel", but it always exploded.

Back then he thought that the canisters were being destroyed, but then he remembered that he never saw sharapnel...

And concluded that what he made was a cannon, and he wonders if he ever hit something.
Sure. But I have a day job and no time to put together critical analyses of random stuff on the internet. Plus I don't really care what other people chose to believe.
> And what difference does virtual versus physical machines make?

As the OP seems to have suggested, virtual machines don't have a lot of memory.
vert.x doesn't have near the community Hudson/Jenkins does. It likely requires a strong steward with corporate backing. If RedHat would support a fork, that's be awesome. Maybe under the JBoss name. Vertx is Apache licensed.
How directr got a ton of bad reviews in The App Store and what we did about it.
New job != new company. One could transfer internally, or find a project involving X and contribute, or in the right environment, come up with a new project entirely.

If you don't have the autonomy to learn new X's as you wish, then your job probably doesn't justify aversion to looking elsewhere... unless it's paying you hedge-fund money.
Salt Power: Norway Project Gives Osmotic Energy a Shake
I just wanted to illustrate the increased complexity and different domains of the commands.
Google Admits It Was Blocking Windows Phone 8 Maps
Rituximab for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Jumping the Gun
Sometimes they're literally not allowed to hang up. You could just set the phone down and leave it for a few minutes.
There's certainly other models. Not sure if they are better or worse. There's the W3C model. I don't even know what that is honestly as although they help propose standards much of what they do is document what browser vendors have implemented after the fact and then try to get the browser vendors to agree. I don't know what their funding model is

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees

Their specs are public though

The Khronos Group (OpenGL, OpenCL, etc) is a pay to participate organization but they make their specs public.

My point is only that even if ANSI, which others have brought up, needs money their model of charging for the specs isn't the only way to do it.

As for the original article it certainly does seem outrageous that there are laws that require you to follow some standard and you have to pay to access that standard.
I could never adapt. I didn't like the way one deals with older items.

Care to tell us how you use it?
The thing is, these things are supposed to be personal. But someone can fork it.
IMHO this is what separates a good engineer from a self thought programmer. To be a good engineer you need to know what goes under the hood which affects your decisions in critical situations. So big companies are searching for developers who have great engineering insights.

P.S: A good software engineer may also be self thought I do not want to be understood wrong.
It certainly can. I like to create a lot of small hobby sites for fun. I pay $20 for a VM with ~700MB of ram. How many JVM web apps can I fit on it vs node web apps?

Or, I run a few hundred servers at work, also on VMs. I want to create a process that needs to run on all of them in addition to what the server is actually used for. Maybe for monitoring, maybe for server management, etc. and I want it to have a REST API. Suddenly using 100MB matters to me.
No, you're not the only one. It's awful.
We don't hear many complaints about speed. What kind of speed issues are you experiencing?
Congrats to Trello! It's one service/solution I love dearly.
Restore Tidied Pull Requests
Device To Device Wireless Charging: eCoupled Technology
Did you mean:

I guess Debian is the kind of distribution you put on a computer that you want to sit in a room and run for years without a problem.
I believe you are referring to the case cited in the first section of this article:
Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Circuit, 2002). (https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/293/293.F3d.791.9)...
> The community is always quick to learn from
> its mistakes however

There was a tutorials site on the front page of HN recently. It has a few PHP tutorials.

http://codular.com/implementing-pagination

$sql = 'SELECT * FROM `articles` LIMIT ' . $startArticle . ', ' . $articlesPerPage;

http://codular.com/part-2-rating-system

INSERT INTO `ratings`
(`rating`, `ip`)
VALUES ('{$rating}', '{$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']}')

In fairness these aren't your typical "straight out of $_GET" vulnerabilities, but they impart a lax attitude towards security. For example, in the latter example above, $rating is escaped just prior to its use in that query, but $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] isn't. In the former, there is no indication whatsoever of where the variable $articlesPerPage has come from so it's impossible to tell.

The notion that some variables are "safe enough" that they don't need escaping is naive. $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] is a global variable that any other code anywhere in the script can write to. While you can't get owned immediately after putting that code live, it is still a tiny little SQL injection vulnerability waiting behind the scenes for an attacker to chain it together with some other similarly minor flaw and break in.

To this day I still come across PHP code that is vulnerable to serious, immediate SQL injection vulnerabilities and it isn't always old code. I'm not so sure that the PHP community is so quick in learning from its mistakes.
A real geek would know the Anarchist's Cookbook is chock full of dangerous misinformation and avoid it.
> Most have no idea what "stock" is, or why they might want it.

Don't you think it's trending towards people knowing though? E.g. N4 being instantly sold out, worldwide. Could be thanks in part to Google's huge campaign both online and on TV for Nexus.
Didn't really understand the title, should it be:

"I can't afford it" is a choice
Computer Chronology, 1938-1988
The cognitive dissonance is startling:

> Yes, of course Google could force most of us to use Google Plus begrudgingly tomorrow if it wanted to, but that’s playing with big, big, brand fire. And that’s not really who Google is at its core anyway.

> Want your business to appear on Google Maps, Google Local, et al., so that you can tell your prospective customers where you are, what you sell, and when you are open? Yup, you guessed it--you need a Google Plus Local Business page now.

The title "Plus-One This" is just another reminder of why G+ is such a failure: it's embarrassing to even talk about it. The name is clunky and awkward, as is trying to tell someone you +1'd something. Do you see what I just had to type? What the hell is that? And how do you say that out loud to someone? "Yeah, I plussed that article he posted". Wow, gross...

It's also got that whole "made for geeks" stygma because it's most frequently seen in use as blogging platform for techies. So not only are you labeling yourself a geek by talking about it, you're also forced to use awkward phrases like "I plussed that", or "Why didn't you plus my post?". No thanks.
Giant squid filmed in Pacific depths, Japan scientists report
Whats missing from this list?

HipHop making an alternative VM. I see that as the biggest change in PHP in 2012. Sure HipHop has a translator/compiler (HPHPc) for a while now, but now they have a full fledged VM with a JIT (HHVM). Maybe next year we can get a sane extension framework and make a less memory intensive construct then zvals.
Not impressed. Not convincing enough.
What was your plan and what proof did you have that it would work?
Buying lottery tickets is completely rational.

Buying a lottery ticket gives you licence to dream. If you don't buy one then you're stuck in your respective rut (family, work, financial, geographical, etc). But if you do buy one then you can dream about "what I would do if I won!"

It doesn't matter if the chances are one in a trillion, because winning is only a small part of the "value."

There are two distinct types of lottery tickets, each with different kinds of value: instant gratification (e.g. scratch offs) where the exciting aspect is higher but the time to dwell is lower, or the delayed gratification (e.g. weekly draws) where excitement is lower/delayed but the dwelling time is higher.

But in general every time I read someone bash lottery ticket buyers because "don't they know the odds!!!" I just have to roll my eyes. Because these people couldn't have missed the point more.
Rebooting a blog in under 24 hours with Jekyll
You know, I've had a fair number of services that I'm paying for just vanish out from under me, too (e.g., eWorld, iTools, Grove.io, the original Siri). Sometimes the wind-down is longer, sometime it isn't. And, conversely, some things I don't pay for have been around for a very, very long time (Freenode, Gmail, my old Fidonet BBS, etc.). Maybe paid sticks around longer on average, but I think paid-v.-free is a bad litmus test.

I think there's a much better one: how easy it is to take your data and go home. With Trello, the answer is "exceedingly easy." On any board, just go to "Options" -> "Share, Print, Export..." and dump the entire board to JSON. From there, it should be easy to move your data onto Remember the Milk, Pinterest, org-mode, or whatever's appropriate for you. You can even automate grabbing that JSON on a daily basis via the API, if you're so inclined.

So while I understand your argument, your actual risk here is very, very low.

As another Creeker pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the Trello team has some stuff coming out in the future that you may find appealing, if you would feel better contractually paying for stuff. But in terms of risk, I think that it can be very low, today, whether you pay or not.
> PHP5.4, PHP5.5, PHP5.2 and PHP5.3 (in that order...)

I thought Python limping from 2.7 to 3.3 was silly and confusing. I'm glad I haven't been working in a PHP shop recently.
Not quite, you'll run into various class/modules/methods not found.
The ones who liked their fingers found the army improvised munitions handbook.
I'd say asking them as well, "What do you think you'd pay for it?" could be useful to establish if it's genuinely worth going after it, but it's a really awkward question to fit in and it's a really awkward question to answer as well.
Xperia Z: Answer To The iPhone 5 And Galaxy S3
Not true -- the original Core series was x86-only, with x64 coming in the Core 2 line.
Ok, now you know that we're going to ask you what was your strategy, so let me ask, what was your strategy?
Well, that's the beauty of OSS, the work isn't lost, it just may need to be forked.
They don't check for uniqueness of email address when registering via google, so perhaps this claim is dubious :)
First cracks appear in Windows RT's locked-down desktop
"This Version of ionCube was not vulnerable to a possible decryption"

Does he just mean "this version doesn't have a readily available dissassembler yet"? Even if they chose the path of compiling to native code, if you own the box, it can't be that hard to get the code.
"> Step one: Corral every single blogger. Have you used Google lately and noticed faces appearing next to certain posts? That’s called Google Authorship--bloggers can link their Google Plus profile to the content they create. Guess how many online writers see that and say “Eh, I don’t need to have that.” If you said “zero” you win a prize.
False. I couldn't care less about a silly profile pic. I also don't even use Blogger. Perhaps the author is unaware, but there are quite a few bloggers out there who _aren't_ using Blogger, and who happen to control the ability to alter their blog at-will. This would include putting up silly profile pics or whatever."

You completely missed the biggest benefit stated by the author: the protection from duplication by content farms. When someone Googles the blog post, the original blog is always on top, rather than some content stealing farm. How did you miss that?

The point the author made was that it won't "force you down a path", rather it will lure you with capabilities. My team started using it for Hangouts, because the screen sharing/etc was better than the other products we were trying to use, and by better, I mean faster/smoother/more reliable. Anyone who refuses to enhance their capability out of sheer stubborness is someone I will NEVER do business with.
Many SICP exercises would be similar to, "Ben Bitdiddle thinks he can define COND like this: [bunch of code]. Show why he's wrong." Which is not practical whatsoever--it's clearly a short problem for academic purposes.

In contrast, PCL would say, "Now we can write a media server, let's go!"
> What Microsoft should really do is play Apple's game instead of Google's

It's Google that plays Microsoft's game, which has been played before and Apple lost.

It's inevitable for Apple to get caught by competition, they are also bad at competing on price and their distribution network pales in comparison to the distribution network of all Android phone makers combined. One or two years ago, people talked about how small the Android apps ecosystem was compared to iOS, but nowadays they are almost on equal footing and eventually Android's ecosystem will get much bigger.

If there's anything Microsoft learned is that hardware becomes eventually a commodity and their Windows/Office monopoly made it possible for them to release one shitty product after another and still have room for recovery.

Apple may be more profitable than Microsoft, but they don't have the same wiggle room for screwups.
Wow. Giant squid are the coolest thing next aliens in my book. Read a 20 pg article about them in the New Yorker once. Thanks for sharing!
Chuck: Well said.
Not sure why you were downvoted, you bring up a good point that should be explained.

Vert.x is "polyglot" (i.e. write in various JVM languages) and multi-threaded, even clustered, easily. For people who are building services and care about these things, it's a boon. Our team has been planning to use Vert.x for future services, but this development certainly raises concerns. I understand it can be forked, but I would rather see the two companies working together rather than battling it out.
Ubuntu Phone OS Demonstration by Mark Shuttleworth at CES 2013
Just for another perspective, my experience doesn't really align with this. From my (biased) perspective, this sounds like "in theory" as opposed to "in practice" so I'm honestly curious if you've managed to get away from having to really deal with cross-platform differences.

I know that in theory you use a cross platform engine that hides away all the messy details from you.In practice, I've found the PS3/360 have quite different CPU/memory architectures and you start dealing with the reality of that sooner than you'd expect. Whether that requires manually down sizing certain swaths of textures or writing code that will run on the SPU, there's quite a bit of manual work involved.

Also, most game studios tend to roll their own tech which generally requires at least a small cadre of people manually targeting and optimization for each platform.
Why the Keurig K-Cup is the Beginning of the End for Great Coffee
One thing I think people don't appreciate is that Trello isn't really competing with Basecamp/Jira/FogBugz. Those tools are all really well designed for fine-grained project development. Trello is beautifully designed for a much higher-level view of a project. It would be entirely sane to keep track of the general status of your project, while still keeping track of its minutia in something like Basecamp. That's exactly what the Kiln team does: a single card may stand in for all of Kiln HyperSync, even though dozens of FogBugz cases, with due dates and escalation states, may sit behind it. This isn't a failing of either tool; just an acknowledgment they fit into different niches.
Well you kind of implied new company when you mentioned passing the interview (yes, I know at the larger tech firms you can interview for other teams internally). Either way, I don't think changing jobs internally, starting a new project, etc. are trivial tasks either. If I'm content working on my current Java project at work, but I'm interested in learning some Python on the side, I don't think I should have to switch jobs/roles/companies/projects just to practice Python. Also, while I agree with you that it would be nice if most companies offered the autonomy to work in whatever technology you wished, that simply isn't the case, and not everyone has the freedom/motivation to change jobs easily.