skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it a little ironic to decry the "ivory tower" in a discussion about a site filled with free, online lectures from ivory tower universities. They are providing much of the learning for free at this point, so the only thing missing is the "marketable degree at a low cost." The "marketable" part is largely a function of the selectivity of the university in question, so I doubt that a low cost degree from a new institution will be highly marketable any time soon. You pretty much need to convince society first that your university is prestigious and selective and the best students all want to go there, a veritable Catch 22.
Many times when you want to constrain an element's size and/or alignment based on the size/alignment of elements above/below and beside it, you need to use table layout. Consider a simple layout from a site I will be launching very soon (not to scale):

BBBB
A BBBB
BBBB
CCCCCDDDDEEEEE
CCCCCDDDDEEEEE
FFFF
FFFF
FFFF

You want A to be vertically centered with B and horizontally centered with C. You can't give a fixed width or a fixed height to anything because the layout needs to be fluid. I don't see how to do it without using table layout.

If some dimensions of some elements can be fixed (e.g. the width of A and C), or if some alignments are changed to make thinks convenient (e.g. align the bottom of A with the bottom of B), of if approximate alignment is good enough, then often nested block/inline-block and some positioning fu can be used instead of tables. But, sometimes the automatic table layout algorithm is exactly what the layout needs.
it does have break, yes (and I think continue though I confess I have never used it :))
Yeah, well if you're not compliant with PCI-DSS then I wouldn't have too much sympathy if that occurred! The rules are not onerous or arbitrary, in fact PCI-DSS reads like Chapter 1 of "Information Security for Dummies".

There's a pretty good summary on the wikipedia page but it basically comes down to maintaining competent system/network security, not storing auth data like CVV2 and never displaying full card numbers, restricting access to the card numbers to those who need it and traceably logging it when they do, writing up a "policy" document which consists of stuff like "employees shall not disclose their passwords" etc, and commiting to test (and log that you've tested) the whole setup every month or so. No big deal.

Most of it is kind of obvious. A decent operation is going to doing most or all of that stuff as a matter of course. It's just kind of a checklist really, formalising what you already know to be good practise. Nothing to be afraid of.
I meant the Safari beta, d-oh
The perils of a table-based layout (open in IE for the full effect)
Don't you think that's a bit disingenuous? Clojure is still changing with a fair amount of frequency. As far as I'm aware, they have not even hit a 1.0 release yet (releases are currently referred to by their release date, which tells me it's still in the pre-final stages).

It's a great language, but there is nothing to gain here by claiming it somehow is mature because Lisp is 50.
Of course, marketing is important. Apple also has very sexy hardware on its side, something RH doesn't. People basically buy Macs and they happen to come with OSX just like people buy Dell and that happens to come with Vista by default.

You have to actively choose anything else if you want to run it.
Crafts And Art Supplies
A few YouTube videos you can't see in China right now
FYI. This is no longer an issue. It was fixed even before ovi256 posted this comment which is why in the original post, he mentioned that the server was down. That's because his IP address had been blocked and a fix was deployed.

He later edited the comment to remove the part where he said that the site was down...

I got your email, too bad you decided to go this route rather than emailing me about it first. It's all good though. No hard feelings.
What's CVV?
Just curious, which library are you referring to when you say "good 3D graphics"? I'm writing a graphics engine using PyOpenGL, but that's just a minimalist wrapper over the standard OpenGL API that's available for dozens of languages.
Accessibility to the Face: A Case Study
It's the numeric code on the back of the card near your signature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Security_Code
If they are able to offer the service for free to some, why is this a bad thing again? I'm Canadian, so am a little bit sad that I won't be enjoying last.fm for free (or, in my case, at all) anymore. However, I'm not mad that others will be able to.

And why is it a bad thing if you offer your service for free at first?
Yahoo's TV Widgets service tries to bridge the Web/television divide
Why NPR will have a tough time duplicating its broadcast success online
Open-source online textbook startup gets $8 million in Series A funding
Wee, Ruby 1.9 and Continuations
Ask HN: How to deal with SYN FLOOD and extortion
We made a big mistake in our server setup. We bought beefy as app and db servers but went for ultra reliable sun ultrasparks and openbsd for firewalls. This was fine until the DDOS started. After 3 days of many different attacks we now how much better firewall hardware installed thanks to our fantastic colocation which went the extra mile and helped us when we needed their help most but we are now surviving on total brute force.

Our firewalls are faster then the SYN Floods that hit us. This is an arms race that we cannot win in the long run. Yes we can buy more hardware but it's much easier to infect more machines with bots over time.

How do people protect themselves against extortion and malicious ddos attacks? What software / hardware protects the bigger sites on the net?
I wonder if the original intent of posting was to be helpful or for mockery. My second language to learn was PHP, perl being the first, and I have since moved on. I probably asked,( myself/google not others,) similar questions the article covers. But the fact that articles like this continue to be titled "Advanced..." is a hint to where the language and community are as a whole. I think the bigger issue is a commingling of subjects. If your intent is to learn PHP, learn programming with PHP as a language. If your intent is to learn web development, learn web development in terms of available technologies, industry standards, and best practices. A lot of the articles content is laughable not because it is common sense PHP, but common sense programming/web development. PHP != Web... or is that PHP !== Web?
In this particular case of Gerry Sussman choosing Python over Scheme, I don't think he's using "practical" to mean "I know it's wrong, but I'm comfortable with Java so Python seems more familiar".

I think "practical" often means choosing your battles. Sussman's choosing to fight the battle of explaining some syntax to his students rather than the battle of implementing a real-time robot control library from scratch in a language where no implementation supports real-time very well. Sun-Tzu would approve.
I grew up in a small town in Ohio. My mother was a high school librarian and my father was a unionized janitor. By the standards of our community, we were considered well-off to the point of being gossiped about a bit. A couple of weeks into college, I was talking to a friend whose father was a physician. He asked of my family and then said, "Do you guys do OK?"
I have used both Postgres and Mysql and recently found out that Rails postgres adapter is broken for legacy databases. However, here's a good discussion on stack overflow: http://tinyurl.com/c29ftj
Merge History, DAGs and Darcs
Undercover 3 - bad news for thieves
Except that Verisign has shown itself repeatedly to be the least trustworthy of all its competitors, for most of its major businesses.
Semantic Search Could Secure Google's Future
It's Always Ada Lovelace Day at O'Reilly
This could just as easily be titled, "The perils of a terrible web developer"

Tools/languages/frameworks don't kill web sites, people do.
A gaming world without consoles?
That cost way more then 3 pounds a month...
In the case of athletes, it gets exacerbated by the fact that they are often young, uneducated, distracted by their sudden fame and very visible.
Hey all. I'm the other dev on this site.

We were actually pretty surprised to see users sharing their startpages on their blogs and such. At first we didn't really get it; I mean the only reason we made them public was so that you could access it from where ever you were without having to log in. Basically, we made start.io to act as an attachment to a browser.

But some people really do like sharing their links. Maybe it's just that they're used to sharing all their content online. One of the most visited start pages comes from a ministry sharing belief-oriented links to their visitors.

I'm not sure what un-prepped signups will use it for, but I don't really care, either. We developed this to be a flexible platform from the beginning. That's just what happens when you made a product customizable, and for a general purpose. People will shape it to their needs. The obvious example here is Twitter, which began as a service to publish away messages to the web. Then people wanted to group their thoughts to channels, then they wanted to message, now they want to network and expand their names and products. Twitter is a good example of a platform that made getting information from the users brain to a public domain incredibly easy.

Thanks for all the comments so far, this is great.
WatchMouse site monitoring dashboard widget
Yes, I use PyOpenGL in GTK (with GTKGLExt). People have said good things about Gazebo, but I haven't used it.

Most of the 3D stuff is performance-critical, so I typically prototype in Python and then convert to C++, which for graphics code isn't too painful. The Boost.Python interface makes it pretty easy.

Also, the Cairo graphics interface is wonderful for drawing charts, animated robot stick figures, and many other visualizations. It has a full Postscript rendering model with alpha blending.

It looks like PLT Scheme has an OpenGL binding too, though I haven't seen it used. It looks very low-level, for instance it has separate methods named:
gl.Vertex3d
gl.Vertex3dv
gl.Vertex3f
gl.Vertex3fv
gl.Vertex3i
gl.Vertex3iv
gl.Vertex3s
gl.Vertex3sv
Overall, good idea for a service.

My criticism/questions:

- Price is way off: $10-100 CPM for simple message delivery? Does it come with delivery guarantees/retries? In fairness: What's the use case with which you would justify this pricing?

- (How) Do you ensure that email sent via your service is not marked as spam? Reliable mass email delivery is hard these days.
It's not exactly enterprise material, since AFAIK it only works when your laptop is on, but it's nice if you have a few non-critical sites you want to keep an eye on.
Check out http://www.geonames.org/
On seeking an overhaul of the U.S. student loan system
Rather than complaining about how everyone else is a bonehead for not using Lisp, write some libraries to make it useful for more things in the real world.

Thank you. Cannot stress this enough. (Making said libraries portable helps, too!)
Pyro is great. We don't use it because I started our robotics code base in 2001, but if I were starting from scratch I'd use many pieces of it.

I believe the main reason why robotics has progressed so slowly in the last 30 years is that getting the damn hardware and firmware working together takes 90% of the available time and students barely get beyond that. So libraries that abstract away most of that and enable plug-in real-time control modules are going to give the field a huge kick in the pants.
> worrisome trends in CS education ... Mathematics requirements in CS programs are shrinking.

Speaking as someone who had to take several attempts at differential equations to pass it, and has (a) had a very solid career since graduation; (b) has never used even integration or differentiation a single time since graduation, let alone numeric methods, etc., I call BS.

Tons of math is useful for about 1% of programmers.

For the rest of us, it's just a form of hazing, like intern doctors being forced to work 48 hr shifts.
Pretty cool stuff - I remember playing this game non-stop back in the early 90's.

I think he's wrong about tearing open app bundles though - you can just unzip them.
It all seems like a pretty fair assessment of what a programmer ought to know in terms of programming languages. We can all find things to disagree about in the details, but this seems very close to Eric Raymond's "how to become a hacker" essay. Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Maybe you'd want to switch out Perl for Ruby, and not bother with Ada, or add Haskell...

The thing that gets to me is that we fret so much about the curriculum. We all know the list, we either choose or don't choose to engage with it. I don't think this can be pushed into someone's head anyway.
How are you going to make money? Can I submit my site to be a "sponsored" link on peoples start pages?

Why do I need to give you my email address?
The Commonwealth Bank.

(Sorry -- only Australian's will get that! Basically - their long running marketing slogan was the question: "Which Bank?" Long running to the point that I was once asked it playing an Australian Edition of Trivial Pursuit)
I've seen the fail whale 2 times today. Refreshing worked, but the problems there aren't entirely solved.
I'm from Australia and I will probably keep my subscription.

I rarely use the streaming radio, save for times when I don't have my iTunes library close by. My main use of last.fm is the statistics and play counts it keeps. I know I get that for free, but for €3/month it's a small enough amount to give them something for creating a great service that I use daily.
Serious downtime and downtime are not the same, and if twitter is down for a few minutes that means a few minutes of not receiving an SMS because you're routing your services through them.
Heads Up: Does your site still work with IE8's InPrivate Blocking turned on?
I noticed a lot of sites, including the sites of some YC companies, have lost a lot of functionality when InPrivate Blocking is turned on. Basically, any site that JavaScript or images from from another domain (especially addthis.com, google-analytics.com, gravatar, disqus, intensedebate, adsense, recaptcha, etc.) are breaking, sometimes badly. AFAICT, the only way to keep a site working in IE8 with InPrivate Blocking turned on will be to host everything from the same domain (or a subdomain) as the page.

Note that InPrivate Blocking functions independently of InPrivate Browsing; you can keep your local history and cookies functional (InPrivate Browsing Off) while having InPrivate Blocking On. That means it is convenient enough to use all the time (like I am doing) in order to block ads and other annoying widgets. It is also something that is pretty easy to turn on and use accidentally (especially since its effects don't start right away).

If you depend on any third-party content on your site, you should definitely make sure your site works in InPrivate Blocking mode before IE8 gets pushed out to millions of people on Windows Update.
They might feel left out at Stanford, but people are writing articles about them, so I don't feel too bad.
TED demo of wearable computer tech from MIT Media Labs
Move yourself into the cloud and let someone else deal with it. Seriously.

I'm a big fan of outsourcing anything you arent 'great' at. In this case, its running firewalls. Unless of course your app is something related to server maintenance or firewalls or security, etc.

Most software companies really shouldnt try to deal with this stuff -- I had to learn the hard way. You should only spend your time on your applications, not anything else that doesnt directly benefit you. You can get lost in the maintenance.
People often say that Java has great libraries, but is it true? AWT is crufty and ugly. Maybe there are impressive XML parsers (Xerxes is 188,000 lines of Java!), but I don't want those. Numerical libraries seem bad. So what is the library that might convince me to use Java for something?
Nice. Yeah, the GL graphics code is pretty easy to convert to C++ when performance matters. It's wonderful to quickly prototype graphics code in Python with full error checking.

Also, if you haven't used it yet, check out Py++. It takes a lot of the pain out of hand-authoring a Boost.Python code file. I'm using Py++ to automatically generate Boost.Python bindings for the C++ library FCollada. (FCollada is a library for accessing 3D modeling data exported into the .dae COLLADA format.)

Thanks for the tip about Cairo.

Also, glVertex3d, 3dv, 3f, etc are part of the standard GL API. The 'd' suffix indicates 'double', 'f' indicates 'float', 'i' indicates 'int', 's' indicates 'short', and the 'v' suffix indicates that the function accepts a pointer rather than 3 separate components passed by value. Of course, the glVertex* API has been deprecated because VBOs are far more efficient.

Just curious again, why do you use OpenGL for Anybots? Do you create simulations before building new robot prototypes?
I suppose my point was that the principles of Lisp have lasted 50 years. Python (which is great) is the child of many, many Lisp-y ideas, but I don't think people will be using a variant of Python 32 years from now. But I would definitely bet there'll be many cool Lisp variants 50+ years from now, some of which may have taken some really good ideas from Clojure. Let's make it happen ;)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528178
Python has some issues that can really interfere with doing Scheme-style FP in in it (no tail-call optimization, single-expression-only lambdas, closure/scope problems, general hostility from Guido), but IMHO it's a great general-purpose language, and well suited to teaching, particularly for introducing higher-order functions.

Lua has much more Scheme influence than Python does (while being otherwise pretty similar). Its design assumes proficiency with C, however, so, while very practical, it's probably not as good a language for people new to programming.
Use Servertastic - https://www.servertastic.com/. They're basically the cheapest and best.

If it's a personal site or you're on a really strict budget, get RapidSSL. It's a single cert, non chained, cheap enough. A wildcard is $149 a year which will serve most needs well. However, there's one important caveat - mobile phone browsers suck and you will have difficulties with them using a RapidSSL cert. Long and miserable experience there, trust me.

If you care about mobile browsers, or your few remaining strands of hair, you need GeoTrust, which bumps the price up. "TrueBusinessID" is the one you need, $114 for a single or $499/yr for the wildcard.

For both of these, the prices are lower for multiple years, of which you should probably buy as many as you can afford. Refreshing SSL certs is a nasty fiddly process and unless you are on a really low budget it is probably best to eat the upfront cost and buy 5 years out.

In answer to your question, why isn't there any other options - well, because they were there first and their cert is everywhere and that's the price they want. Simple as that. Sucks but here we are. At least $499 is less than $995.

(I am not affiliated with Servertastic in any way, shape or form other than as a satisfied customer)

(edited to correct prices, i'd put the multi year discounts instead of single year prices. sorry!)
Ask HN: What do you use to order airline tickets online?
I'm using Kayak, any better ones out there?
Wow, that DocStoc embed actually looks decent and improved the page. Usually I hate that kind of thing.
Well, the options are that or starving to death in a crap economy.

No matter how good some of the clients may be, if they can't make money off of them, they're wasted resources.

If people want free Pandora in their area, push people to advertise w/Pandora. Someone's got to cover the expense, and clearly Pandora themselves can't cover it anymore.
For Python, there are also a number of game libraries around which you might be able to repurpose. Pyglet, Pygame and PyOgre are three which spring to mind.

Depending on exactly what you're trying to do, of course...
This is absolute BS; nothing more than a nasty rumour.
Please don't post this crap here.
I never really got into last.fm because Pandora is so good. I just recently started using Pandora again after a long break and it's even better than when I first started using it - I used to have thumbs down individual songs all the time to teach it what songs or artists to include in a channel, I can't even remember the last time that I've had to do that.
Actually it's right there in the contract... although I'm no legal professional, so I could be misunderstanding it.
Any large ISP should have a process and gear in house to mitigate DDOS attacks; you should escalate, first to your hosting provider and then to their upstream provider.

Every ISP does something a little bit different for large-scale attacks. Some of them off-ramp traffic to scrubbers, some of them have inline devices that can characterize and block SYN floods. My previous employer, Arbor Networks, now has gear deployed at something like 90% of the worldwide tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs that will detect any major flooding event and generate a report which might be helpful to you.

What I'd watch out for is the dozen odd fly-by-night operations that are promising you that, for a monthly fee or a one-time purchase of some $100k box, you can block these attacks on your own network.
Just curious, but how would "the cloud" help with such a problem? Sure, supposedly you could summon infinite computing power to handle the DDOS requests. But the computing power would not come for free, so the DDOS would still do serious financial damage.
I just use the airline's website after shopping around.
Is Facebook Safer than MySpace?
Noted in the footer - this article is a chapter from his book Five Simple Steps: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web.

http://www.fivesimplesteps.co.uk/

I highly recommend it for any programmers that want to get either get into the basics of design or interface better with designers. I used to recommend The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams and still do, but Mark Boulton's book is a PDF that you can download right away.
Can you link or excerpt?
can anyone help me upgrade my ipod touch to iphoneOS 2.x using pwnage tool so it will be compatable with cydia, so i can get to put flash player on it?
Ehm, excuse me but gimme a break.

Owning a CA is a license to print money - it's as simple as that and really no need for excuses.

The costs you cite are dwarfed by the profits.

Vetting/validation and support is a fixed cost (support squad), legal costs can't be too rough (how often is that warranty actually claimed?) and well, cry me a river about the chain of extortion going up the CA chain. Yeah, it's really annoying you can't build your own money-printer, you have to rent it!

Honestly, a tiny bit of math sobers me of any pity: 1 million customers, $100 bucks a year. That's a solid one hundred million bucks annually. That kind of money buys quite a bit of vetting/validation and legal costs. It might even cover your 30T/month crl-traffic. Barely.
your provider (or your network guy, possibly you) needs to blackhole the source of these attacks (preferably notifying the ISPs in question.) most of the better co-location providers will give you a way to blackhole traffic from certain IPs. Really, you should be able to do that from your OpenBSD firewalls without help from anyone else, assuming the problem is too many syn packets rather than too much traffic. dropping all packets from a particular source IP is not expensive, even when you multiply that by a large number of source IPs.

<please ignore this comment, I'm completely wrong. see the next comment.>
ROTFFLMFTO!

If only it was a bit longer down the page, it would have been the ultimate parody of the extended centered-text funnelling salespitch.

enjoyable.