skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It seems like copy&paste are a challenging computer science problem [irony]

You have no idea. Issues that cross my mind:

- plain vs rich vs embedded: which one to paste, and at that time, if applicable, how to degrade one into the other? ask the original app, which knows the semantic? store multiple versions? store once, as-is, and hope the target app knows how to handle it, leading to inconsistencies?

- persistence across app life cycle: copy, close app, paste into other app. For years Linux, X or something simply could not do that and your paste would fail.

- UI concerns: it's easy to take the current, refined by the years way to handle clipboard for granted. remember how at some point some implementations required you to click a button on a damn toolbar. Notice how competing alternatives exist, such as X autofill with selection buffer pasted with middle click, xterm's left click to move left + right click to move right, OSX's growth of selection to the closest selection edge, or the infamous quick mode CMD.EXE way that gets copied with enter.

- security concerns: apps could be running with different levels of privilege, and you certainly don't want less privileged ones to have uncontrolled access to the clipboard buffer data, whose data may come from a more privileged source.
Some technologies we used:

CoffeeScript, for the Chrome extension

JRuby (Sinatra), for the RESTful service

Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)

Java, for tying together other various Markdown conversion libraries
Maro is commiserating and you give him a theology/philosophy lesson.

Further, I studied buddhism for a while. I have no idea what you're talking about. In other words, YMMV.
Don't worry about the weirdo investors! They're still alive, they were not harmed in any way, they'll be fine. They aren't even investing their own money! All investors have a broad strategy, and they have anticipated that not all their investments will work out.

Also, you should be celebrating the risk you took to build something great. There's absolutely no shame in that. Feel proud of everything you learned, these lessons will remain with you for the rest of your life.
... a long time, major customer left pissed off. Nope, not seeing how it can be considered a success. With a reasonable flight attendant there's no reason to consider that there might have been a risk of anything but a calm flight in the first place, so having him leave calmly is not success.

I've never had anything but good experiences with United through a couple of hundred thousand miles of flights (London <=> SFO regularly for a few years - still got about 100k unused miles...).

But if this had happened to me, I wouldn't be flying United the next time.

My choice of United instead of British Airways or Virgin for that period was entirely down to Uniteds much better (for me) frequent flier program (LHR <=> SFO gave me upgrades to business around one leg out 3 or 4 or so on average, while BA and Virgin were impossibly stingy, though the quality of their business class was better), but that would not outweigh a risk of not getting on the plane.

United is not exactly in an economic situation where they can afford pissing off their best customers.
Having two brands does not necessarily confuse consumers. People understand that Dell makes Windows PCs. They'll understand that Samsung makes Android smart phones.

Apple itself has numerous brands. Apple and Mac OS, running on a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro. That's no more confusing than anyone can handle.
It seems unlikely based on the views of rails core.
I agree, you can parse HTML with regex but...probably should not. If you must, then at a minimum you should normalize the html first. For example ensure that spaces are stripped out of the front of tags (i.e. < html> becomes <html>) doing things like this, that do not change the actual content of the markup can make parsing much easier.

I still prefer using Javascript or jQuery on the client side or HTML Agility pack on the server for manipulating markup.
I flew over to see a customer (only a 2h domestic flight) to solve an 'unsolvable' problem. They'd been going through it with support for weeks with no luck. I got to the customer, took over his chair, edited a single file, added a missing ; character and it worked. Done. I got the next day and a half 'off' because my hotel/flights couldn't be rearranged for an earlier return.

The root cause was a piece of paper on his desk with a diagram of the systems and their IP addresses.

Direct shell access to the machine wasn't possible. To get a shell on the machine that ran the processes he had to go via a separate gateway host, and the connection from the gateway host to the destination machine was done by hostname (as the gateway machine had access to the internal DNS).

To get a copy of any config files he was able to FTP to the server directly from his laptop, but he wasn't able to use the same DNS servers as the gateway host so he relied upon the piece of paper on his desk which had the names and IP address of the machines. Unfortunately the IP address for the system containing this config file was the one for the corresponding dev system, not the production machine.

Every time he ran the process he was using the config file that was missing a ; character and so it spat out an error.

Every time he got a copy of the config file (via FTP) he was actually getting it from the dev system which wasn't missing the ; character.

Much back and forth from support on "are you sure that's the right config file?" and he always responded with "yes".

When I got there I looked at the config file via the shell (on the right machine obviously) and spotted the problem straight away.

I didn't make any money out of it, but I did get a day and a half to look around a new city on expenses.
Well 3M already figured this out: http://www.dvice.com/archives/2011/01/3m-flexible-mul.php
Ditto for nuclear.

Had my fair share of discussion with neckbeards on the Internet touting how incredibly clean nuclear energy is. You know, as long as you leave out the mining (radon emissions being one of the commonly known issues, the chemicals involved in mining not as well known; furthermore, many mines don't get any cleanup after decommission) and the storage of the nuclear waste (which is simply an unsolved problem). But hey, less CO2, right?
I will just add - I bought a cheap no-name Android tablet and got a great impression. It has a low-res screen, yes, but other than that I can't complain. The system is vanilla android with no crapware, it's easy to use, it's OK for playing videos and basic games.
Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman
There are many good reasons we all know that DRM is evil, but here's another:

I wanted to buy a book recently, but for various reasons I don't want to have that purchase permanently associated with me. The only ebook options were DRM'd, so that was impossible. They all necessarily bind the book to your account.

My only option for maintaining some semblance of privacy is to buy a hard copy from an independent retailer.
Issue is that it isn't unique, there's other players like http://blitline.com/docs/blitshot. They are also a lot more expensive.
If we're to believe certain statements and quotes from the most famous terrorist around that I won't mention, it was exactly their aim.
A watch shaped like a bracelet and easily removable. That very much suits my intuition of what an iWatch would be.

I have a pet theory that, when removed, the iWatch will be flat and it will be possible to use it as a phone by holding up to your ear. The cellular technology will be in your iPhone Maxi or iPad. The importance of such a feature is simply—but not unimportantly—that this would look less dorky than holding up a 5" phone to your head or using a bluetooth headset.
Started One Company, Seed Funded a $1b+ Startup, Now Mr. X Seeks Cofounder.
It appeases the throngs of slacktivists that run amok on the Internet, primarily.

As has been stated elsewhere, the only real effect this can have is if it gains media traction. Which, given than there are celebrities and murders to report on, is always very unlikely in the US.

If 100,000 people wrote personalized letters to their congressmen and women, it would likely have a much more substantial affect. The problem is that people prefer a "fix my problem" button.
Everything You Need To Know About Low End Box
We were merely in search of a good web framework. Java has battletested libraries but so does python and a lot of other general programming languages. It still isn't answering our core question.
A decision on what web framework to use has much more to do with the framework itself(its philosophy and community) than with the language it is built in.

Coming to django, I would argue that it is the best documented project on this planet! Django has a huge number of plugins, quickens the process, and is based on some amazing philosophies(DRY) and you happen to admire what a big deal it is when you go deep into design of your web app.

Also, I can even argue that I can get a programmer who doesn't know python to start on Django in 4 hours. Now, I wouldn't bank on this point as it is a language ecosystem point, but it is a true fact, happened to me some years ago.

Lift, is cherry picking features from django/rails, which is actually a good thing, but I see it being a lot less progressive as compared to Django even at the scale at which Django is right now.

Play, I haven't used, so cannot argue much on that. I think Play2 is less than a year old? Surely, I cannot let my startup developers write more bytes than necessary. Why code something which is already done and that is precisely what happened with us when we started working with Django. Well tested libraries can be pip installed.
You want to make a quick buck? Hammer out some freelance jobs on odesk.com, freelancer.com, etc.

You can spend a week's worth of evenings plus the weekend and net a good few hundred dollars.

The advice I just gave, while accurate, isn't very valuable because it doesn't scale. I've done it a few times, bought myself a nice holiday last year with the proceeds. But it's not something that grows, you have to keep grinding away to create a recurring income.

I preferred it when my websites regularly produced £60/month in adsense revenues without me having to lift a finger. (That not-lifting-finger part only lasted about a year though. Now I barely make £6/month because I've neglected my sites).
Easier to steal than an iPhone?
Depends entirely on what you are doing. If you need to parse a page and be sure that you have found every single link in that page - even javascript - then a regex is going to fall flat.

If you need to collect a number of links from the web using a spider, and you don't really mind if you get them all or not, then regex is perfectly fine. You could do a regex to match the first href="" following "<a" and stopping when it hits a "/>". This will give you at least 75% of the links on the internet, and it's done it in far less processing power or ram usage as a full html parser.

As always, a chainsaw is not necessarily better than a butter knife for cutting down trees, if the 'tree' in question is just a 5cm shoot. In fact, using a chainsaw for that would be mighty funny.
If all 100k people chipped in a $100

I've actually thought for some time this is an area the tech community could make a positive impact addressing the inefficiency of a small focused interest prevailing against a much larger, but unfocused public interest.

Thinking more like if 100M people contributed $1 to fund politicians that protect the public interest.
Actually, there are also "scavenger" congestion control algorithms that use leftover bandwidth. The most high-profile example is LEDBAT used by BitTorrent's uTP. uTP is indeed a TCP clone, but I had my chance to develop a protocol which was using LEDBAT and it was NOT a TCP clone at all (it later became IETF PPSP).
So, TCP eating all the bandwidth is not an issue sometimes.
So they want to make a Pebble knockoff. Great... More shit for me to buy and immediately have it go out of date.
Social Gaming That Works: How Our Flash Game Reached 18 Million MAU In Two Years
A year of urlbox would be $120.

Suppose Sue Webdev bills at $60/hr. and needs something like this for a clients website. She's never heard of webkit2png before, not sure if she has PyObjC 1.1 installed and can't seem to find installation instructions for Windows.

Will Sue be able to create her own urlbox clone in two hours?
>>So the government can tell you how to run your own personal life health care like they can tell you how fast you can drive, how powerful (weak) your cell phone can be, etc.?

I'm not sure if some of that was supposed to be irony. In terms of healthcare, the government pays almost half of the cost of providing care in this country. Not only does it give massive tax breaks to employer provided health insurance plans it also directly writes the regulations that govern almost every aspect of healthcare. In a sense, the government is already running your healthcare if not outright paying for it or compensating the hospital then running the system that provides or incentivizes the structure of the health insurance plan you have.
Could it have been your NAT which terminated the connection due to inactivity ?

Quite a few stacks have implemented RFC5961, which should make this attack rather challenging.

(Though, I totally agree with the fundamental problem).
It isn't silentbanned but slowbanned, hacker news gets very very slow and almost impossible to use unless you wait the very long times to post your dead comment.
It really shows we're still in our very early baby steps of space exploration when drilling a hole in a different planet is considered marvelous news.
The language Java is simpler than the language Python or Ruby. Fewer keywords, those keywords do fewer things.

Ruby and Python seem simpler for most web work due to better frameworks and dynamic typing, which is less simple than static typing, but is easier to work with in most web situations.

I guess I'm drawing a distinction between 'simple' and 'convenient'. Monkey patching in Ruby is not simple, but can be convenient and make rails possible.
That's true, but I'm not sure I want to model my language usage after overzealous RIAA lawyers :-)
This is just one of the worst disasters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Creek_Flood

Plenty of other "accidents" large and small.
These are all accurate...
Opera CTO about Open Sourcing Presto (Opera's engine)
HowTo use now PlayJson stand-alone module introduced in Play-2.2-SNAPSHOT master
While there appear to be a number of sites operating in this space (documented some here: http://web.onassar.com/blog/2012/11/19/web-based-screenshot-...), this looks simple and straight-forward. While the cost is prohibitive for me since there are free alternatives (http://immediatenet.com/), it's great to see more competition in this space.

For what it's worth, I'm using it on my site http://imnosy.com
A mere fact that there's a White House petition for something that in other countries is an indefeasible right - use your phone with any carrier you please - greatly saddens me. I find it astonishing how the Land of the Free can tolerate such treatment.
Sony's initial releases are larger than later slim versions for the same reason that computers used to take up entire rooms and now fit comfortably in your pocket. Given that it's not releasing till around the end of this year the design probably isn't finalised and they don't want to show it till it is.
The name Android was inherited from a pre-product company Google bought. The logo was copied from an old video game. Neither were intended to be a brand. Android as a brand is a legacy of Google's geeky days. Not that that is a bad thing. Android is a nifty fun technology, and having a name that's more fun than "OS Flux Version 7" is good.

Android phones always had a Google logo, and the original branding strategy was for Android to be in the background behind names like "Droid." Android only became a brand because Google has so much more mind-share than mobile OEMs.

Android fading as a brand is, at best, a a sign that the Google ecosystem and OEM brands like Galaxy are coming to the foreground. At worst, it is a sign that Google has lost control of branding and that the Nexus brand has been rolled out too slowly.

One problem Google faces is that OEM brands come with OEM bloatware that is 90% useless. Samsung's mobile device management extensions are the only OEM "innovation" I can think of that is actually a useful improvement. While there is nothing wrong with pre-loading thoughtfully curated software, there ought to be a "reset to Nexus state" icon on every Android's home screen. Conflating OEM bloatware with brands is a very bad outcome.
Startup Ideas: Three Tips From Steve Jobs
Thanks for the explanation, but the watches in your examples use very little juice. Apple's concept device has a large touchscreen and a persistent network connection with other iDevices. That uses a lot more power, that's why I was surprised to read that they're trying to run it off ambient light and kinetic energy -- I would've thought it wouldn't be worth it.
In general, no. Regular expressions match regular languages but HTML is a context-free language. Every regular grammar is context-free but not all context-free grammars are regular.

See
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/590747/using-regular-expr... for details. Also

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5175840/is-html-a-context...

And then you have attempts to recover when HTML is ill-formed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_soup
I tend to agree. Think about the difference between signing a petition and doing what effective grass roots organizations (the NRA is a good example) do. They flood the offices of the legislature with phone calls, letters and emails. Although the numbers may be equal, the impact is much greater because it takes a lot more passion to pick up the phone than to sign a petition. It's the difference between stumbleupon traffic and google traffic.
Yes. From the fourth bullet point in the article:
"Systems administrators are the most sought-after Linux pros"
Medicare and Private insurers are two separate things.

Insurance companies negotiate rates with hospitals/doctors/etc. Medicare _dictates_ rates which providers can either accept or reject.

The reason the Medicare cost of an Xray is ~$20 is because it was decreed to be that expensive. It has no bearing on the cost to provide the service since the hospital had no input in the reimbursement decision.

You can search and easily find reports about how doctors restrict the number of medicare patients they see because the reimbursement rates for care are too low.
Microsoft Azure pips Amazon as king of cloud storage
You Can Win A Trip To San Francisco To Party With Silicon Valley Royalty
Show HN: Chrome extension adds doctor ratings to your insurance co's search page
The most usable charting solution keeps getting better.
It's not just XML. Why would you ever choose SOAP over a simple REST endpoint? If you use SOAP frequently, have you used jaxb or jaxrpc? Those things were awful.

The systemic problem, which isn't just hindsight, is that you had 6 corporate vendors, each with their own internal politics, in a room with cross-corporate politics, creating a standard. Of course it will be a bloated monstrosity. It's not just hindsight to say that, that arrangement could turn all kinds of great ideas into disasters.
Somalia doesn't really have a functioning government. You could try there, if you don't like having your 'life controlled'.
In my experience, an XPath (or CSS selector) to get relevant information is both easier to construct and easier to understand than a regular expression, and the resulting code is more likely to continue to work as the website changes. I don't see why you would subject yourself to using regular expressions unless your environment doesn't have an HTML parser.
Goto statements are a good example. It's easier to recite "goto is harmful" than to say "In most situations, other control structures are more expressive and easier to maintain than goto statements. However, there may be rare occasions, particularly in low-level system programming, where goto statements could be preferable."

"Don't parse HTML with regex" is good general advice, but no more an absolute than avoiding goto statements.
Also, how do you access a site behind a login wall?
A big company will always have the potential to do harm. If it's not about what they're doing, but what they could do, then any company that has influence in a market needs to be taken down.
I don't think that solved the problem of cost, it simply changes who pays for it. Less scarcity, lower barriers to entry, and more competition are what decrease costs. That could be done with the government paying, but it's harder.
I really like it!

Ditch the reddit branding and come up with a different product name and logo.
Birdseye Mail: Mail for tablets
As the guy who signs bills into law, and as the head of his party (meaning that he dictates how they are going to be whipped) he is lawmaker number 1.
How Firefox for Android dealt with overdraw issues
my general rule of thumb is: founder is someone who starts before salaries, employee is someone who is paid a near-market salary on day 1.

the risks of starting before salaries are that you will accumulate a ton of debt (or waste away your savings, or both) for a project that ends up going bust. you will lose many friendships, perhaps even your marriage, because you believe so strongly in an idea that ultimately may or may not work out, and you put 100% of your available time and effort into it.

there's nothing particularly glamorous about that statement i just made. starting a company is hard and it sucks and it usually ends in failure with the founders hating each other.
That's a good point, actually. I should have read closer.
TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition Review: Math in Color
It is hardly impossible. A well designed survey could easily figure it out. I don't know if any publicly released studies have looked into it, but I am sure at least Google knows.
Heh, no worries. Looking back at it, I realize I could have written that more clearly anyway. :-)
On Revoking Ubuntu’s Root Privileges
Could not've.
The Degree is technically an MComp not an MSc - and I understand that Newcastle is not the highest ranked University (it seems to sit around 13th for Computer Science) but financially it is not viable for me to switch to another University at this stage. I would like to work for a large corporation - but I accept the reality that that may not be possible straight away. Thanks for all the comments by the way - peoples varied opinions have been very instructive.
An economist called Akerlof has shown in 1970 that markets whose players have asymmetric information are doomed.

The private health insurance market is a well known example of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Agree. I really like their financial charts also.