skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nicotine and alcohol are legal. An employee of, say, the federal government should not be partaking in illegal drugs. If a person with a security clearance is regularly doing cocaine, at least one person (his source) knows. He is now vulnerable to blackmail. This is why we have random drug tests--I've never been called for one, but I will not consume illegal drugs because I could well be called tomorrow.

I'm also impressed by your assertion that employees will think, "Shit, I can't smoke weed, guess I better start doing coke!" It's like the whole "gateway drugs" thing, except he skips straight to the hard stuff because the gateway isn't available to him.
Attitudes like this are short-sighted, and part of the problem. Finding innovative and elegant solutions to solving problems is more scalable than the brute-force approach of throwing resources and having them churn out more LOCs to solve it. Not saying its easier and requires less effort to do, just that it results in less LOC's that scales better and provides better building blocks to build on.

Look into the special properties of LISP which Alan refers to as the Maxwell’s equations of software:
http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equat...

Its more powerful and extensible than most languages despite requiring orders of magnitude less effort to implement (see: Peter Norvig's Lisp interpreter in 60 lines of Python http://norvig.com/lispy.html, and re-written in 40 lines of Ruby http://stuff.thedeemon.com/rispy/).
I would say you are right except in one case, which is scientific computing. The OP touched on it, but that is definitely the "killer app" of the Python ecosystem, IMHO. Not that the languages you mentioned don't have equivalents, but if you are a rubyist who just wants to do some heavy-duty scientific/data-intensive computing without stepping too far out of your comfort zone, I can see Python being an attractive option.
Have you decided on what formats and/or third party services you will be exporting to?
6 Laws of Subtraction
Elixir is a fantastic language and it's a lot of fun to code with, but you need to know at least the basics of erlang to use it well, because although it has an excellent standard library, it's not as comprehensive as erlang's.

I would definitely recommend anyone that wants to try Elixir, to at least try learn some erlang first. The learn you some erlang book is pretty fantastic.
"There's no such thing as viral" David Heinemeier (37signals) http://youtu.be/0CDXJ6bMkMY
Speaking of it: Support for WebDAV, SFTP, box.net, SkyDrive, SugarSync, AFP and SMB would be great too! (In this order.)

Otherwise a proper scripting language in a spreadsheet app on my iPad seems very promising. It would be also great if one could search public scripts of other users.
Will You Soon Be Able to Buy Used eBooks & Digital Music?
This is quite an interesting document. I'd love to have pov from Hadoop "power-user" on this.
> it's hard for the human brain to validate that the 20 things in my cart are the same as the 20 items in the list

In this age of smart-everything, there's no help for that?

Seems strange.

Further, to make things even less difficulty, I'd think it'd be rather straight-forward to map out the select stores they go to in the extremely small set of markets they serve. Certainly considering this is their profession, no?

They could make an app for that.
Everyone is confused! This guy is not dual-booting or using virtualization. He installed ubuntu to a chroot. Ubuntu is running in a chroot along side ChromeOS. He's using the ChromeOS kernel.
You could probably write something like:

User.email.validation

Similar to that query project.. Can't remember the name now :-)
I imagine that such a thing might actually incentivise the company to hire white males because they know they can fire them more easily.
Web site breaks page zoom. Argh.
It should be for everyone asserting patent infringement allegations, not just "trolls". That way, they would at least think twice about using trivial patents against others, knowing that if they lose the trial, they have to pay the winner's expenses.

It would also encourage some companies to take companies who are asking them to pay "patent fees" to Court if they think the patents are not good enough, and they could win.
Implementing PHP syntax in JS is just ass-backwards, IMHO. Why not use something simple like Mustache? I think it's a nice middle ground because it lacks logic and runs in nearly any language. It's also used by the easiest JS templating library ever, ICanHaz.js.
Why BitcoinStore is going to bring an end to a Decade of PayPal
Startup Rebranding
Using Dart with Sublime Text 2
Paranoia is often useful, but with a good enviorment, and tools it's rarely need. I find bad assumptions often cause the worst problems. Break things regularly and you end up with fewer assumptions about the code base / production environment which is a vary good thing.
You don't need an insider, Steve was saying it publicly years ago:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/06/jobs-the-ipad-begat-the...
I don't see the correlation here
We spend more money on training and prevention of Waste/Fraud/Abuse than we would actually lose due to the occasional person buying beer with his travel card, but as you said, it's more important to prove we're trying than it is to actually save money.
So many people /do/ do this - but how many of them deign to lecture a CSR at a cell phone company on their lax security policies, then write up a long-winded blog about doing so, all the while being blind to, or wilfully ignorant of, their own security faux pas?

Oh, and now the CSR knows his banking password too. Handy.
> He had the right to access all of the articles he downloaded individually.

Had he downloaded them all individually he might have retained that right. As it stands, MIT and JSTOR both took action to remove his specific permission to do so, so it is incorrect to say that he had permission to download anything from JSTOR after his download permissions were removed.

He should be prosecuted for repeatedly gaining unauthorized access to a computer network that he had no permission to be on. The manifesto simply shows to the prosecutors why he was doing that in the first place, and why he wasn't just some bored MIT student on a pen testing spree.
Something that may require some thought if you want to do this is how you handle import/export of documents with embedded scripts.

You'll need to be very careful not to fall to the "applications that download additional code" rule there. This happened to Codea (http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/comment/14504#...), and afaik they still haven't managed to get their project sharing feature re-approved.
Why is bitcoin the one "true" alternative? If payment services like Balanced and Stripe solve most of the problems of PayPal (frozen accounts, pleasant APIs, etc) then why are they less worthy alternatives?
> Using a GUI tool for db management on the live db?!?!?

I still use the mysql CLI and have for 10 years plus-or-minus, but I actually use Sequel Pro a lot. If I'm perusing tables with millions of rows, or I want to quickly see a schema, or whatever, it's been a net gain in productivity.

http://www.sequelpro.com/
What's important when building iOS apps?
one huge problem (which the article does allude to) is that women simply do not feel as safe as men when interacting and meeting up with a stranger. it has little to do with attitudes to casual sex and everything to do with the relative perceptions of safety.
Except you don't typically hear that about public utilities. Have you ever heard someone argue that their sewers should be sold to private corporations to operate because that would be cheaper?

Private enterprise can do it so much better! Capitalism!
Why do my property taxes keep rising and my broadband
isn't getting any faster?!?

But my cable internet bill already does go up every few months without any improvement to my bandwidth cap, or speed.
All within reason. We're not going to try to be a silo, if that's what you mean. We want to be as interoperable with other applications as possible.
>> Libraries and services to manage this will appear. Mozilla are running their own, which most will probably use. (Think how Google runs the Play Store, but others can run Android app stores too. It's just that this will be far more open than that.)

It's an important point and outlines the differences in Mozilla's approach. The same applies for Mozilla Persona. The cost of openness is building a system that's loosely coupled and then adding the glue afterwards to make it easy for many.

It's quite the opposite of closed systems and you have to see the longer term vision to understand why Mozilla starts out with this type of solution.

@chrismorgan, it might go a long way to include the plans for a "hosted" version of the open model as a convenience layer. Most won't make that leap themselves.
Indeed. I don't particularly like that common cliff, and think starting monthly vesting right away for those present (and initially equal) at the 'true founding' would be better.
GRID looks very nice. And they do a good job showing off its capabilities in the videos.

The only problem is that I couldn't find a link to buy it from. Is it available yet?
>So patents are only valid if held by their originator? That would make the IP non-transferable.

They could sell to anyone who practices the invention, just not to a patent troll.

>In ARM's case, it would mean a takeover would invalidate its value.

This is a good point, but it's cleanly solved by exempting mergers. That would allow two ARM-like companies to merge without losing their ability to license original patents, but it still beats back the trolls because a merger only allows you to combine two complete entities, it doesn't allow you to transfer anything less than the entirety of each company's patent holdings to a third party.
No, it's awesome.

It makes "morphing code", such as decorators easier to write. It's explicit. It's consistent (with class methods for instance). And it's not some special case magic with special syntax. It's just another parameter.

Python's great strengths is avoiding special case magic. Much more than many people realize as there's lots of syntactic sugar on top of double underscore functions and interfaces like context manager and generators.
Similar experience - their customer service is great, but the one time I tried using them they missed about a quarter of the items in my order (of only a dozen items). Their website was also an extremely buggy MVP - images didn't match what was delivered, and navigation was a mess. I like the idea, but I'll wait for them to iron out the kinks in their service.
If I sometimes smoke a joint on friday night when I am at home, does that make me a defacto irresponsible person?
This is just terrible.

Couldn't have been someone affiliated with the institute; MIT hacks are creative and witty.
The Glass Bicycle
It is built of a simple wordpress template, but it should let startups easily make an account and post their info for everyone to see.
http://support.verizonwireless.com/faqs/My%20Verizon/billing...
Wrong.

Delphi has offloaded .NET support to a partner (RemObjects' Delphi Prism/Oxygene). Since Delphi 2007, they have doubled down on native development. Even releasing native console and GUI compilation support for OSX, and iOS in late beta.

Since Delphi 7 (released in 2002), Delphi (and FPC) have added:

* Generics
* Anonymous methods
* Enhanced RTTI
* Attributes
* Records with methods
* for in loop
* final methods
* Inlining
* Operator overloading
* sealed methods
* strict private
* strict protected
* Nested classes
* Class helpers
* Class constructors and destructors
* Static class methods
When Brain Damage Unlocks The Genius Within | PopSci
Wedding planning startup Loverly reveals gorgeous redesign: We dive in
WTH not? It was pretty outrageous. I'd be interested to hear your argument that he deserved even 6 months in prison for copyright violation.

Outrageous to whom? You?

I feel the punishment doesn't fit the crime, however, that's the punishment. I wouldn't want that punishment so I do not steal copyrighted material. That's Atwood's point in it's entirety: Swartz knew there were strict penalties and wasn't willing to accept the consequences if caught.

... which is not to say that if a crime is reported, it will be followed up by law enforcement.

This depends on a lot of factors and you know that. But there isn't some Illuminati deciding whether every case is important enough to prosecute.

That's the link: that justice is only just if the rules are the same for everyone, and they clearly are not.

Prosecutors prosecute what they think they can win. Swartz was a win for obvious reasons, HSBC wasn't for reasons unbeknownst to me. Our system is what it is. If you can't accept losing, don't play ball.
Viber - Millions of users without making a buck. Should it really be that way?
Another difference between MacBooks and Chromebooks is the guaranteed availability of Linux drivers. If you buy a MacBook to run Linux, you have to do your research first, just like a Windows laptop.
“On one hand, women are extremely powerful and we’re leading the workforce and climbing to jobs that are simply amazing. But, on the same note, we want to be feminine, we may not necessarily want to be the ones approaching the guys. How does that work? You still want to be the girl at the bar where the guy is the one who comes up to you.”

Well... tough! If you want to be leaders, you have to take responsibility. It's hard to take initiative, it's scary to risk rejection, but someone has to. And if you want equality, that means you gotta step up and do your share of "approaching".
From a past example at the University of Pittsburgh[1], the result is simply a campus-wide lockdown and increasingly strenuous security requirements for those caught in between the hoaxer and their target.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_University_of_Pittsburgh_b...
I would say you are right except in one case

I would add GIS as a second (if somewhat niche) case. The two big commercial players in the field (ESRI and Safe) as well as most of the open source players all have Python as a scripting language
A simple solution to credit card fraud, part 3: the startup that never was
If there's money to be made, then there will be sleaze balls who'll try to make money.

Happens all over the world, all us humans are alike.
Pinterest now only for registered users
Nope, article doesn't claim that. I just said that Python and Pascal have a with statement, I didn't say here is an implementation of Python's PEP-whatever in Ruby.
And I have no interest or desire to get into language flamewars. For me this basic functionality is enough.
Thanks for your link, but I've investigated MIDI support in JS. I actually work on piano/guitar apps, and would love to build a high performing, low latency app that hooks up with a physical keyboard. If you know how this can be done, please let me know! The last time I looked into this, the best solution I could come up with was a Java applet. :-(
It was a Saturday, so I'd expect there weren't many people in campus buildings anyway.
I think that everyone does this at some point in their career. Don't let this single event define you. The most important thing to ask yourself is what was the lesson learned...not only from your standpoint but also from the business'.

In addition, to heal your pain its best to hear that you're not the only one who has ever done this. Trust me, all engineers I know have a story like this. (Please share yours HN - Here I even started a thread for it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5295262)

Here is mine:
When I worked for a financial institution my manager gave me a production level username and password to help me get through the mounds of red tape which usually prevented any real work from getting done. We were idealists at the time. Well I ended up typed that password wrong, more than 3 times...shit, I locked the account. Apparently half of production's apps were using this same account to access various parts of the network. Essentially, I brought down half our infrastructure in one afternoon.

Lesson learned: Don't use the same account for half your production apps. Not really my fault :).
Social Engineering & Fraud: Tips to Mitigate Risk and Other Hacker Tactics.
>I wonder how effective it would be if every trolling victim filed this motion for sanctions automatically.

What makes you think they don't already? The problem with patent trolls isn't that what they're doing is illegal, it's that what they're doing is legal.
The Arcane Rules That Keep Low-Income Kids Out of College
Comcast Punishes BitTorrent Pirates With Browser Hijack
Do you want to sell sugar water, err, todo list apps for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?

Big organizations have the potential to be great places to work. How can you criticize the ethics of hiring at large organizations when we see daily accounts here about how terribly discriminatory startups can be with their "culture fit" requirements? I work for a large federally-funded organization. We are quite diverse, have good job security, we all get our own real offices, and we get to work on important problems that actually stand to make an impact in national policy. Sure, meals aren't free, but we also don't have Chet the Brogrammer Boss telling us to stay late on Friday to crush that javascript.
It does? The linked article doesn't mention that.
https://waza.heroku.com/2013
A Cure For Jet Lag? Take A Photon Shower Courtesy Of Delta
He wasn't logged in, if he was logged into the account he could have done what he wanted no problems, the reps don't have your web password. Your chat/call in password is different, it's analogous to asking for your SSN to do an account change.
Is there a reason why it was not created with multiple commands / methods in mind? :

class UserService
service :signup do |config|
config.required do end
config.optional do end
config.execute
# signup stuff here
end
end

service :delete_account do |config|
config.required do end
config.optional do end
config.execute
# signup stuff here
end
end
end

This would also make it possible to do service description and even expose a json or xml api using just this.

But I guess the controllers are created for this. DHH says controllers are responsible for mailing and stuff, which is more correct than in the models with callbacks.
This is a naive interpretation. It's easy to imagine that "application quality or capability" is some easily measured metric tied to easy to measure numbers (like FPS or megahertz). In reality for many applications performance is not the long pole, so moving them to the web adds many advantages. I find it weird that someone could make the claim that "web apps set us back 20 years" in 2013, when web apps have transformed the world economy so tremendously (google search, web mail, amazon, online banking and investing, etc.)
My favourite way to test restores is to do them frequently to the dev server from the production backups - this keeps the dev data set up to date, and works as a handy test of the restore mechanism. Of course if you have huge amounts of data or files on production this becomes more difficult, but not impossible, to manage.
I don't think he actually meant this was true. I think he was saying it just for that fact that it is true for many other people (at least that's what I gathered from the note in that section of the article).
A startup is teaching non-technical employees to code - Wakefield
Arq Backup and Amazon Glacier
http://scientifics.net/2013/02/27/arq-backup-amazon-glacier
<3 Peter DeFazio
> ARM is, for all intents and purposes, a non-practising entity.

I'm fairly certain ARM employs more technologists than lawyers. They also make actual products, and even if the patent system disappeared tomorrow, designing processors would still be a viable business. In this way they differ from trolls, who make nothing of value but are merely parasitic on the productive economy.
Software Engineers: What was your biggest ever f*ck up?
I just came across this story where a 'junior' engineer truncated his entire prod Users table (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5292591).
Every software engineer I've ever talked to has done something that was a major disaster. Would be great to read about your fails too!

Also add what was your lesson learned!
Playing the passive role is actually a form of power. Women get to decide who gets to play the dating game and who sits on the sidelines based on whose advances they accept and reject.
Interesting! I don't really have _any_ experience with that field, so I definitely would not have guessed that Python was so prevalent. Thanks!
Awesome tale.

However, I think the CTO was the one who deserved to be fired.

Not having at the very least develop and production environments is a higher ups fault.

Where I work, developers can't even touch production systems, there's a separate team responsible for that.

I even have a solr, nginx, php, mysql, etc separate install of almost everything in my workstation, so I only touch test servers when doing testing.
> Indeed, `sum` was the one common use case I could think of

There are 4 other not-completely-uncommon cases in the builtins, implemented in a significantly more efficient manner for the latter 2 (ignoring Python v C): min, max, any and all. And map and filter technically but repeatedly concatenating lists together (in python) isn't the most useful way to peg your CPU.
Dear Ms Mayer, I don't want to work home
My biggest f*ck up:

When I worked for a financial institution my manager gave me a production level username and password to help me get through the mounds of red tape which usually prevented any real work from getting done. We were idealists at the time. Well I ended up typing that password wrong, more than 3 times...shit, I locked the account. Apparently half of production's apps were using this same account to access various parts of the network. Essentially, I brought down half our infrastructure in one afternoon.

Lesson learned:

Don't use the same account for half your production apps. Not really my fault :).
> It was a Saturday, so I'd expect there weren't many people in campus buildings anyway.

That's not the same MIT I remember.
How does a CSR verify a person calling is the true account holder without a plaintext view?
I personally don't know many people who are dismissing it off as "ugly, useless, and un-productizable."

Almost everyone understands this is the room-sized ENIAC equivalent of our times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
Supporting third-party keys in a Secure Boot world
All of your hosts belong to name.com
Distributed Collaborative Editing for Eclipse
If you want to know why PayPal has been around for a decade with no competitors, you should read this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5295236
Ask HN: Learning by doing : Hadoop 
Hi,

I picked up a Hadoop couple of months back and am finding different ways to use it so as to apply what I have learned so far (MapReduce, Hive, Pig, etc).

As Hadoop is really used in environments where the data to be queried is large, I started looking around for such kind of data. I came across the Wikipedia data (available for download).

Now I am trying to list out the questions that I could as this data.

What are the questions that you want answered from the data available in the Wikipedia data?

This will help me write some useful MapReduce code , Hive quries or Pig scripts to improve my skills.

I just feel that learning by doing is the best form of learning.

Thanks.
Google Glass needs a Zack Morris
This is more a UI/theme issue than anything else, but clicking a footnote places that citation behind the sticky header/search bar in FF17