skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would make software developers' lives a lot easier if so many people weren't scared out of their wits by computers. I think even basic programming knowledge can really help with that, because it makes it abundantly clear that a computer is, itself, a tool rather than a magic box (that happens to contain some tools in between all the scary and confusing stuff).

It isn't so much that I think everyone should be writing their own databases, but some understanding of how good software _should_ work, (for example, standard data formats), can guide informed decisions about software. Some basic technical knowledge is enough to understand why you should never build a large website on an ancient CMS where you end up with thousands of HTML pages that will need to be completely rewritten, one by one through some clunky web interface, when the site's design changes. Anyone should be able to look at that kind of setup and say "hey, that's complete garbage — let's hire someone who knows what they're doing!" and there will be a few less website janitors in the world. And hopefully a few more people making cool new stuff in their place.

Sorry, that kind of veered off course :/
Do we really need retina displays? Or are they just trying to make something new for us to spend money on? Right now Sony ASUS and Lenovo are doing fine. Nice headline. You got me to read the first paragraph or so.
Tapping the Power of Cold to Lose Weight
Final version of that fragment: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf

It's actually mentioned in some of the comments of the SO post.
Even with one process/worker, so without any parallelism, nginx is faster than apache most of the time. If you want to make a meaningful comparison you should set the workers to the number of CPUs the OS sees (hyperthreaded or not).
Chrome, Firefox and Opera provide more than enough credibility to the argument, even if Safari no longer works on Windows.

Besides, OS X has moved towards multi-touch gestures, for example, which Safari supports. It makes sense that they'd have to give up on Windows.
I think this is just RFC 3229, with a binary protocol (?) http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3229.txt

I've always thought there were some potential attacks there around cache disclosure (which Google avoided by going with SDCH instead).

CloudFlare controls the server and the client, so they don't need to worry about the attacks or about persuading everyone to adopt their RFC.
A most unusual approach to SnailMail
Researchers say Stuxnet was deployed against Iran in 2007
Stress is a contributor too, even if you sleep well. Clinton was known as a night owl but Bush, by most reports, got plenty of sleep and he still aged a lot.
It wasn't until quite recently in (PC land) that programming tools (namely compilers) were generally free, or even low cost.

In the past you made due with crippled 'Turbo' or 'Quick' versions of the Borland or Microsoft products. $79.99 vs $799.99 for the full-blown version. Some vendors sold C compilers for the price of a used car.

The PC C compiler market had a ton of players: Borland, Watcom, Symantec, Microsoft for 'real projects', while you had low-cost compilers from MIX and Mark Williams and some shareware products as well. You'll be paying extra for things like DOS Extenders, or sound and graphics libraries.

DJGPP came along and gave DOS guys not only a 32-bit DPMI environment but a free compiler!

By that time everyone was moving to Windows (except id software who gave us Quake as one last DOS classic). What did Visual C++ 6.0 cost? Anywhere from a couple hundred to a over a thousand USD depending on what version you got.

Apple makes Xcode freely available, Microsoft has Express editions of their products, and Google makes their Android tools available for download.

Plus, everything else can be had for free. Graphics library? Sound code? Physics engines? Go to Github.
git reflog

Before I learned that command, I'd seen git as a backup tool with some scary options for manipulating history that I didn't want to touch for fear they'd blow up on me. After learning about git reflog, I finally understood that this was like being scared of pressing backspace on the keyboard. Yes, it can erase commits you really really needed--but all you need to do to get them back is:

git reflog

(to find the commit hash you want to get back to), then

git reset --hard ${old commit hash}

to get to it.

Now, without any reason to fear experimentation, I can use git like it's meant to be used. I can edit my local history without fear, then push it to the remote repo.

(One reason to still stay slightly cautious--some git commands run garbage collection automatically, and garbage collection will destroy any disconnected commits. Running "git config --global gc.auto 0" will fix this--I prefer to manage the garbage collection myself anyway, personally.)
An Android Facelift
Open Source All The Cities
There is a lot of ignorance in that thread though. This is one of those subjects where you should be very careful about who you listen to, given all the disinformation floating around on the internet.
>Do I also tell you how long to spend time on it as well? I might think I could get 10 tasks done with my lite plan, only to find out that the PowerPoint presentation takes 5 hours to complete. How do I budget what tasks can be done within my plan?

The Premier team will give you an estimate of the time it will take them to do the project. A lot of our clients have give a deadline for the project. Something on the lines of "Don't spend more than 1.5 hours on this." The staffes then scope the project accordingly.
A nasty local kernel vulnerability
Yeah, that caught my attention as well. I think it's pretty insane for something like this to require backbone to work, the functionality is trivial to implement without Backbone.View.
I feel that if my peers would stop with the incessant stream TV, movie, and video games, they would have no problem fitting in the time to learn all manner of useful tricks, including picking up skills that would free them from the jobs they hate.

I don't believe this is a collective personal shortcoming on their part-- it's probably just the way of the world-- but the idea that so many of them hate their jobs but have ten hours a week to play games/watch films frustrates me. Rationally I understand why you might want to spend the day between your swing shifts waiting tables doing something other than working, but from where I am I think that all I can do is encourage them to do other things and point out resources.
Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Surveillance Law
This is pretty much what I do to circumvent the utter mess Google makes of it's logins.

It's also a matter of privacy. It has happened to me more than once that I did something like watching YouTube videos in the privacy of my own home, only to find out I was still logged into my company Google Apps account, which of course records my history.
Several early programming systems did use custom character sets (custom type bars) as well as typewriter-oriented notations like overstrikes, half-line motions for superscripts (powers) and subscripts (indexes), and colour (red half of the ribbon for comments)¹. Except for APL, which had IBM behind it, these tended not to escape their original research environments.

Relatively large-scale production required I/O devices to share a common character set. These tended to be based on pre-computer character sets (teletypes, punched cards) and were limited in size both by the I/O devices and by storage requirements (don't forget how small and expensive memories were). A lot of work went into choosing character sets.²³⁴

1963 ASCII had an up arrow ‘↑’ dropped in 1967 in favour of ^ (because furriners wanted accents), and a left arrow ‘←’ dropped in favour of ‘_’.⁵⁶

¹Jean Sammet, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals 978-0137299881
²Charles E. MacKenzie, Coded Character Sets: History and Development 978-0201144604
³http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/SURVEY.HTM
⁴R W Bemer, Design of an improved transmission/data processing code http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/366532.366538
⁵American Standard Code for Information Interchange http://www.wps.com/projects/codes/X3.4-1963/index.html
⁶Revised U.S.A. Standard Code for Information Interchange http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html
This is super helpful feedback on pricing. Thanks!
> That'a a programmer-centric view of the matters.

If every device is a computer, every device user is a programmer.

> I want software that works so well that I don't feel the need to worry about how "restrictive" it might be.

You should always worry about the arbitrary restrictions imposed on the devices you own. The demand of software that works is just as legitimate, but orthogonal.

> If I want more power, I'll pull out my laptop.

It's not about power, it's about freedom. Why a phone company has root access to my phone and I do not?

> So what if it’s built with a computer inside it -- it doesn’t matter. [What matters is,] what is it, how do you use it?

That's a terrible, myopic, consumer centric (as opposed to producer), point of view. It does't matter only if you have to sell it, covered in bells & whistles. I don't have to sell it, I have to use it.
Is it really that surprising to you that this would cause such a reaction? Over the past few years, coding has become so accessible that non-technical people are able easily set up projects with a few lines of code. It has also become a lot more social with programmers posting in hundreds of blogs, on twitter nonstop, and collaborating on sites like Github.

This is all besides the point, though. What is wrong with "code fever," as you put it? With that kind of connotation, you seem to be implying that there is some kind of net loss if everyone learns something about programming. Beyond being mad about a fad (which is itself an overreaction, I might add), it doesn't make much sense to me. Care to explain?
Chinese Junk Patents Flood Into Australia
I wonder how much this is happening in other countries and how much headway these types of patents are making. Anyone know of this happening elsewhere?

Seems like another symptom of a broken system.
Meh, Opera now is WebKit ... so the -webkit prefix should work ;-)
If you are going to test Apache at least use 2.4 in MPM-event mode so you are testing apples to apples.

Using Apache 2.2 in worker mode is like comparing 8 year old tech to modern code.

hint: Apache is still about 15-20% slower than nginx even in it's fastest mpm-event mode, but it has many more years of features and modules available - it all depends what your needs are - single site services vs multi-site webhosting

You can always do the best of both worlds by proxying apache with nginx if you need both. Takes one evening to figure out.
The irony of you getting Dennis Ritchie's name wrong is strong...
Good research and writeup.. But 3D bargraphs... Come on!
SMB's should think twice about creating a company profile on LinkedIn
Ask HN: I'm 17 - have an opportunity to work at a VC firm right out of HS.
Hey HN,

I’ve been asked to send my resume to a venture capital firm in Boston, MA regarding an internship as a developer/designer for the firm. I’m really excited about this opportunity and thought I’d turn to this community and ask for advice.

Background on me: I sold my first small company at 15, and started my first start-up company my sophomore year of high school. I’m a great networker and have great connections with investors and entrepreneurs in the Valley. I’m one of the youngest founders ever to speak at SXSW and love technology/start-up companies (enough bragging…)
I'm getting ready to graduate high school and want to explore a few alternatives before I jump back into school. I'm planning on taking my first semester off from college to pursue opportunities that are on the table for me right now (which might not be available after college).

If you ask me which career I would like to pursue, I would not have a direct answer. I know him still “some-what” young, and want to work with start-ups, I’m a great iOS/web (UI/UX) designer, and hope to take the venture capital/angel investor route someday.

I would love to hear your advice or comments on this opportunity or if your company/venture capital firm is looking to hire an associate intern/mobile designer.

Thanks!
I would have agreed with you several years ago - but Google has vastly improved this across their services over the last two years. There are still holes, but I now can switch accounts in a single drop-down on most Google sites I use.

I still have problems with Google Wallet (aka Checkout) and Analytics seems to have it's own multi-account sign-in system.
Most people only use alert() for debugging. It blocks the thread of execution until dismissed which is a nice feature. However, alert() is almost never used to display user-visible messages, which one definitely would use your nice looking plugin for. The concept is called "flash messages" and there are some other plugins that also implement them, but they are not as sophisticated as yours.
Has anyone actually encountered an issue with version 2 that would really piss them off that it's not fixed? I rarely encounter problems, and when I do, a quick restart get's everything back to normal. I find myself doing this far less than with other systems (vim, TextMate). Maybe I'm just not a massive plugin user.

My sense is that this writer is just really picky, and somehow equates constant updates with quality.
So good I felt compelled to donate

If I learned that much from every 20 minute video I watched my life would be amazing
their inability to get good projects on which they would improve.

As someone who learned to code informally and is now looking for their first real software development job, I worry about this most.
Another problem is that CS is often very, ahem, academic.

In the UK, we have the British Computer Society (BCS) who give accreditation. If your doing a CS corse without BCS accreditation everyone knows it will be a bit suspect.

However, the BCS you've probably never heard of, they aren't exactly at the forefront of anything, they are also quite stuck in the past.

In a world where dynamic or at the very least JIT'd languages are the norm, teaching Pascal or Delphi I really doubt is in the best interests of the students. Yet in 2003 that is what I was taught for first year.

So the idea that a CS graduate will be able to go in to software development immediately is a bit missleading. It's more a case of someone who has a CS degree will have demonstrated they have the aptitude to become a software dev.

tl,dr: its education, not training.
this blog post feels contradicting to me. if you paid for sublime 2 - you get your incremental updates as sublime 3. if you haven't paid for sublime 2 you don't have any right to demand updates for it.
Early stage fund
>If you look at the law, it's the combination of the actions that we all tend to agree that he did (the downloading and what that entailed) with the (alleged) intent of republishing them that constitutes the crime he was charged with.

Except...no. He wasn't charged with copyright infringement, he was charged with violating the CFAA and wire fraud. How is whether or not he would have subsequently infringed copyright by publishing the papers to the world relevant to whether he committed those crimes?

That's why this is a big deal. The DoJ came in and said "we think he's going to commit a copyright crime after downloading all these papers, look at his politics" but they couldn't prove that (or else why didn't they charge him with it?), so they poked around for something entirely different to charge him with even though their motivation in prosecuting him was to punish him for the thing they couldn't prove he was going to do. Raise your hand if you think that's how prosecution decisions are supposed to be made.
Just want to share something I've been involved with: http://www.kidsruby and http://www.kidscodecamp.com
Given the usage numbers (looking at netcraft) the two most popular engines were compared. Its a fair comparison, especially when you note that IIS doesnt run in linux. Lighttpd isn't even big enough to warrant a mention

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/02/01/february-2013-w...
At the end of the article it says that they are rolling it out gradually.
True this maybe achieved by refreshing the whole
comments container but what if he is also in the
middle of replying to another comment? What if we want
that new reply to show up in some sort of animation?

You can achieve this pretty easily. You shouldn't be refreshing the entire comments container. If your views are well modularized, the comments container would render many _comment partials. You would simply render a new partial and insert it into the page appropriately. There's no reason to disrupt the rest of the page.

When you do client-side MVC, you end up having to duplicate a lot of your model and controller logic. This happens either explicitly, when you start defining relationships between models and how they should react to changes in associated models (e.g. backbone-relational), or implicitly, when it gets stuffed into view and "routing" logic (and leaving you with spaghetti code that's different but no better than jquery spaghetti). In rails views, you have access to the real model objects and you can still use AJAX to have a "single-page application" without the huge added complexity.

There's obviously a place for client-side MVC and that is RICH APPLICATIONS. Google Docs, Pandora, a photo editor, etc...

I think another factor is what your team looks like. If the person writing the models and controllers is the same guy making the front end, then you should probably stay away from client-side MVC. If you have dedicated frontend/javascript guys, then it might make more sense..
Break into the Big Leagues
Stuxnet 0.5: This Missing Link [pdf]
Get high on beer
I'm sure there's a good reason why Apache 2.4 wasn't in the comparison but the author failed to mention it. Apache 2.2.23 may be a recent release but it's a security update of an old but stable branch. Apache 2.4 branch is a year old and a significant update including performance improvements to complete with the likes of nginx.

I would still expect nginx to "win" but seems a fairer comparison somehow.
I'm still seeing around 25% IE7 across corporate desktops. At least IE6 is nearly dead though.
Cross Frame Messaging with postal.xframe
They are also known as Toasts. I believe that's what the Android SDK refers to that concept as, as well as many other libraries.
It's fair insofar as Debian still ships with 2.2 (2.4 in experimental)
I wonder how much this is happening in other countries and how much headway these types of patents are making. Anyone know of this happening elsewhere?

Seems like another symptom of a broken system.
I don't understand why anyone considers rebase to be scary. It's really quite simple:

Primarily, rebase is a tool for modifying patches. Patches are as much about communication as they are about modifying code.

You edit your emails before you send them, so why not your patches? You proof read your edited emails before you send them, so why wouldn't you test rebased patches?

There are plenty of reasons to use rebase and as many advanced use cases as there are git enthusiasts. However, it's not "rewriting history" because you've always got reflog and cryptographically secure version hashes. It's not any more scary to rebase than it is to "undo" and subsequently "redo" in your text editor. The only caveat is that you shouldn't rebase code on branches that you've shared publicly for the exact same reasons that you shouldn't publish version 3.2.1 and then re-publish it with a bug fix without calling it version 3.2.2.
I think I slightly misstated my point. The problem isn't really about lack of programming tools, but lack of programming as a concept.

You are given a black box which does some stuff, but you have no idea how it does this stuff or how to make it do something else. You don't even know that it would be relatively easy with a decent IDE.
Well, you have to consider that this is due to their exposure to computers in the past. Common users often see computers as this buggy device that sometimes feeds them their emails or allows them to catch up with friends on facebook. Others familiarize it with a tool that makes people antisocial or destroys interpersonal communication because of all of the possible distractions. And even then others think that computers can only do what they make them do on the job and they hate their job.

I'd imagine that if they stopped looking at their computing device in those eyes and were able to truly express their creativity, their viewpoint would change. Programming is not about "[sitting] in front of a screen all day." That's a misunderstanding. Programming is about taking control of your computer for fun, fame, and fortune. It just so happens that our only way of doing that is by sitting down in front of the damn thing, currently.
Stop Requiring College Degrees
Just use your "great connections with investors and entrepreneurs in the Valley". That would be way higher odds than posting this on HN?

Take a semester off is fine, but stay in school!!!
It would be nice to get rid of Backbone. The chief dependency is the event parsing piggybacks on Backbone's, but it shouldn't be too hard to pull that code out and include it directly.
Yeah, I think without the results those requests just don't offer much to a potential user.
To Boycott or Not to Boycott [re. opening access to publicly funded research]
Thanks. This is really helpful.

>"Starting at $6/hour" threw me off. That's the price of the biggest plan, which is 40/hours a week! If I have 40/week of VA work, I'll just hire a VA from oDesk!

We think it is better to use Premier than using a dedicated VA. Since you get assigned a team of staffers. This means that Premier is on 24/7. If you need to temporarily increase the size of the team you can do it by just sending an email. Also there are no weekends since the team rotates. You can also have the most suited person in the team do your project (a person who is an expert at Powerpoint will create your presentation while another person who is great at qualifying leads would handle your leads).
Can't claim credit for the name. I wanted to call it Rocket Sled.
"any sufficiently complex project contains a half-assed implementation of Lisp"

This actually predates PG - it's known as Greenspun's Tenth Rule[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule
Nice dig at Facebook here:

In addition: Google+ doesn’t let apps spray “frictionless” updates all over the stream, so app activity will only appear when it’s relevant (like when you’re actually looking for it).

edit: referring specifically to how Facebook markets it's sharing options as "frictionless": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frictionless_sharing
I think having Google retail stores would've been great and given them some exposure and credibility with people less familiar with phones. That said, I would have also found it unusual given their push to sell things in the Play Store and the fact that they don't have that much hardware to sell.
I read your comment as essentially advocating vigilante justice as well. If you are not saying "we are free to steal if we think it's for the public good", then what are you saying?
Reasons to read and not to read the Lean Entrepreneur
There's a sad story waiting to be written about the developers that have had to spend so much time deliberately introducing bugs into IE10 to make this feature work.
I was actually hoping for an alternative to using alert() in IE7, as that's the only place I still use it for debugging purposes