skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure a "good" result for such software would be much progress though -- any success would be the result of students writing for a human grader. If you actually employ the software grader, students write with that in mind and start looking for "tricks" and "holes" in the algorithm that result in a good grade but diverge from what we humans regard as good writing.
What you say is only an assumption. And if it's true, then I wonder how Android actually got the better user experience lately. I have access to all of iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy S2 and a Galaxy Nexus. For me both androids are quite a lot better than the iPhone (disregarding the industrial design which is best on the iPhone). And I actually have a hard time deciding between Samsung's modded version and the original Android on the Nexus.

Note: Of course, I probably fit into the category of power users. Knowing which apps to disable, which to install, and which to configure (and how) is a good thing to know.
Ask HN: Do I adjust freelance rate due to fact client will be patenting product?
I recently took on a small freelance programming gig for a fixed bid. I sent over a boilerplate work agreement and, before he signed it, the client informed me that they plan to patent the software I build and needed to pull a couple clauses from the agreement.

I don't really mind modifying the agreement but my main questions is: should this fact have any effect on what I charge?
Getting files closed on errors should look something like:

file, err := os.Open(filename)
if err != nil {
// handle the error however you see fit
}
defer file.Close()
// continue working, knowing that file.Close() will be called when the surrounding function returns

See: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#defer
If you look at the moon on the horizon upside down through your legs the illusion that it is large goes away.
Try this article out: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/everything-you-know-abou...
Could you perhaps screenshot what you're seeing or paste a code sample? I'm seeing the same thing as cocoflunchy, just a <video> element, no gif.
Check out the following

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern#Critici...

Also http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatu...

and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignPatternsInDynamicProgramming
Demanding opt-out for something like this is a broken way of looking at it and is, fundamentally, sleazy. Opt-in is the only justifiable strategy.
Everyone's being targeted. GetJar is undoubtedly receiving data from millions of phones, not just yours - you only noticed because you're a developer. GetJar has no idea you're a developer, and if they did, they wouldn't care.

The 'spy on currently developing apps' thing is a nice-sounding theory, but it's wrong. I've worked extensively in this industry (although not for GetJar), and the only developers any company in this space is interested in are the ones that are already moving a ton of units, not ones working on applications that statistically are unlikely to see the light of day or make a single sale. And they're only interested in the big developers because they want to sell them some advertising or get them to run ads in their apps. The money you can make from advertising is huge, while the money you could make from some sort of corporate espionage is tiny. (How would you even sell it?)

The data collected is almost absolutely related to ad targeting. The advertising company fetches a list of installed applications, ignores all the stuff it knows nothing about, and uses the rest to construct a profile about what you like which it can use to show you better-performing advertisements. You use Fandango? Great, we'll show you movie ads. You play Cut the Rope a lot? Great, we'll slot you into our casual gaming segment, and show you casual games.

There's still plenty to object to, if you like - sticking this in a paid game is kind of lame, even if they did disclose it - but it's not at all what you think.
This.
Facebook has a problem on mobile devices. A great number of users use them but the real estate for advertising is greatly diminished. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next iteration, ads of some kind will pop up. In fact its probably the entire reason for this project.
Wait 'til the toddler figures out how to take pictures.
Ah. I thought they were a combination of various things that made them fairly stable, or more so than a 401(k) anyway. Thanks for the clarification.
Interesting concept. It's like RDF for human beings. It's easier for human beings to look at unstructured data, but at the same time it makes it extremely hard to do interesting stuff programmatically. You just can't do reliable inferencing
I explained it: it has important bugs and the team instead of saying "won't fix" said "it didn't occur".
The biggest time sink in adopting vim in my experience isn't necessarily learning the editing mechanics but rather the temptation to customize everything and adding plugins or scripts to perform actions with fewer keystrokes.
probably like explained here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8073803/android-multi-tou...

but imho, given they already downgraded the behavior in 4.0, this is really looking like a security hole that might be closed in a next Android release.
CM is totally awesome..every Android developer should use CM personally.
So when everyone starts copying the design of this Facebook page, the page will become generic? I somehow doubt that’s what parent was alluding to. I read ‘generic’ as an euphemism for ‘unoriginal’, which Apple product pages definitely aren’t.
I'd like to point out that this is the first Android phone which didn't emphasize the logos and manufacture. Most Androids have a horrible cluttered physical design, partly because manufactures slap their logo right on the front.
I think that may why the memo was marked law-enforcement-sensitive and wasn't supposed to get out.

Or the whole thing is a CIA/FBI ruse to encourage people to use a service they have a secret door into, i.e., see Nrsolis's comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5492994.
The problematic aspects of this software are applicable to MOOCs and online education in general. Truly valuable, high-level education requires a level of precise, individually calibrated feedback in order to train students how to think and express themselves critically and rigorously (there are also obviously signalling, credentialing networking benefits that will never be replicable by MOOCs, but that's not relevant to a discussion of pure educational quality).

Computer-driven mass education will never be able to provide that level of instruction. At best, it's a tool for bringing the workforce up to the basic level of competence necessary to function in an information economy, much like how the original purpose of the public education system was to crank out semi-skilled factory workers and low-level clerks. This may be a valuable end - it may help to stem the commoditization of the BA and the attendant tsunami of student debt - but there needs to be wider acknowledgement that it is actually fulfilling a purpose that is different from that of traditional higher education.
Exactly. It's a totally baseless assumption to make that advocates for privacy are using Facebook or similar.
As niggler pointed out in another thread, if you are at 10x your original investment you can close out 1/10th of your position and be left with a free ride in the market.

The trick is to not get greedy, start taking profits as the market rises and then put those profits into less volatile investments.
The first thing I always try on sites like these is stuff like this:

__import__('commands').getstatusoutput('ls /')

or

__import__('subprocess').call(["ls", "-l"])

which gets blocked by the interpreter somehow with

exceptions.OSError - [Errno 11] Resource temporarily unavailable

I'm curious as to how you managed to do this - I've always been interested in how to sandbox something like this.
History Uncut: Bill Gates unveils Microsoft Excel 1987
You will not successfully maintain positive customer relationships by boiling all customer interactions down to questions like "how will that impact your actions [right now]?" Relationships are a string of positive and negative experiences that must be carefully curated.

The decision to remain in a relationship is rarely a singular event (related to a singular experience). You could think of it more as the cumulative result of all relationship experiences. Even the best relationships involve some negative experiences, but the important part is making sure those negative experiences are mitigated as best as possible. Customers will give more leeway to vendors with whom they have a strong NET positive relationship.

There are two important technical points that could have been included to great effect:

1) That they store the encryption scheme with the password record so that they can upgrade their crypto incrementally.

2) That their most recent auth algorithm uses scrypt.

So how do these two points directly impact the mitigation of what is otherwise a negative experience? First up we should look at users who will understand what points 1 & 2 mean. These users will respond positively to these items, because it changes the conversation from "Scribd just got h4x'd" to "Hey, at least they had good crypto in place."

The next tier of users will come along, read these comments, and feel more confident that the community of knowledgable people around them are feeling OK about this, so they should too.

As to the question of, "wouldn't it be better to suggest that all services provide this information up front?" I would say yes, it would. This action is not mutually exclusive of including technical details in this communication though.
Apple: The 'Mitt Romney' of Corporations
What I think we're starting to need is a separation between CSS for visual styling (font-size, border-radius, background-color, etc.) and CSS for layout (float, margin-left, etc.).

The first can only be done by CSS in the browser. But the second can be accomplished via CSS, or by JavaScript.

As the web evolves, CSS for layout is increasingly not keeping pace. But it's not unreasonable to think that we could do away with it altogether.

Is there anything preventing someone from creating totally new layout models, based on new formats, that are parsed in JavaScript, and essentially turn everything into div's with position:absolute? And get recalculated upon window resize etc.?

This would completely free us from existing layout limitations of CSS, to do the exact kind of things like element queries, or whatever else we might think of.

I'm just not really sure what the performance implications would be like.
Wow.. "The Web" project seems especially prophetic:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021201160011/http://www.angelfi...

"As of now, the web is pretty small. Hopefully, it will grow into a larger web. This is one of the few applets that require your participation to work well. If your name is already on The Web because someone else has chosen to be linked to you, then you may choose two additional people to be linked with. Otherwise, if you see someone who you know and would like to be linked with but your name is not already on The Web, then you can contact me and I will link that person to you and put you on The Web. If you do not know anyone on The Web, contact me anyway and I will put you on it. In order for this applet to work, you must E-Mail me your name and the names of the two people that you would like to be linked with. Thank you!"
It's perfectly possible. They're doing it by setting the window type as TYPE_SYSTEM_ALERT, and then switching it to TYPE_SYSTEM_OVERLAY as needed.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowMa...
I don't understand how they do that (never been into statistics); suppose two persons are alike for the above factors, and they do the same amount of training, but one trains for muscle strength and the other to be able to do longer runs. Does this study conclude then that the first one is likely to outlive the second one?
You can install extensions from any site. You'll only get an additional prompt if you're not installing from the mozilla add-on site.

You can think it was about control, but this could not be farther from truth.

<disclaimer>I work for mozilla</disclaimer>
Why would you risk alienating a client and possibly losing the project? If you "don't really mind modifiying the aggrement"
Facebook, like Google, has the goal of getting users to use their service more - as they are an advertising platform. Google Glass means people will search more - when they're away from the computer. Google investing in better internet means people will have quicker connections, which means they'll again means they'll be searching more.

Here, by increasing the likelihood people are engaged/interested in Facebook status events, Facebook will drive users back to their core platform, whether it's their core app or the desktop version - where they will, indeed, get more impressions for their advertisers. I doubt they are dumb enough, though, to actually do this through the home screen of our phones.
The Unfix Bug In Facebook OAuth, How I Hacked Facebook Accounts
Avoiding the "this" problem in JavaScript
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with a UUID and the occasional "phone home" - if UUID X hasn't phoned home in Y days, it's no longer part of the install base. Given that more CM users tend to be obsessive device-wipers, it may make sense to phone home more often; given the limited data points they're collecting, it's a negligible hit to users' data plans (though given some Android users' network misconfigurations, may be more of a hit to CM's servers than they'd expect).

Transmitting and storing md5 hashes of device IMEIs and MAC addresses, though? No bueno. That the project owners don't see a problem with this (and that they believe cracking these hashes is non-trivial, especially given the restricted address space of these two data points) worries me far more than the data collection itself.
It seems like this would be a great thing to implement "shim-first". Create a solid spec that defines the way it should behave, then write a JS library that makes the spec work in current browsers. Then you have a set up where browsers can implement it natively and only improve performance without changing behavior.
It's a Facebook.

Same problem as ~4 years ago when people first saw the iPad: "What exactly is it?" "It's iPad." "How do I quantify it in my paradigm of notebook computers?" "You don't."

You're trying to quantify it as a smartphone. Facebook is positioning it as...well...a Facebook.
Facebook Home – What Can Go Wrong
I imagine Facebook has already considered this problem and it is not a big concern (and likes are their ad business, so they want lots of likes, but real likes to better target ads)...

First, I'd imagine a second double tap will instantly unlike something or something similar to that nature. Secondly, users will just get used to the feature and work with it.
This was my first thought. Facebook did a great job at making it look fantastic but in reality, my experience would probably look much different (poor quality photos, memes, spam posts, etc).
The legend lives.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at but it's weird to me too. You never know what lead to that decision (target markets, promotional video production issues, or maybe they just wanted to play off the "girl at home on the phone with friends" archetype) but it is odd.
contra or contre?
I agree with the basic core of what they're saying- apps are silos, especially on iOS. If they allow third parties to also push content to Facebook Home (and they've been friendly to third parties for a long time) the idea could yet be sound.
Thanks for the advice. I'm still 50/50. Because I'm just starting I'm unlikely to be having large projects to start, so less is at risk.
It's Google, so you have a guarantee it won't be shut down in the near future.

Ohwait...
Wow. In retrospect, when we needed general conditionals in CSS, we got just one, very specialized one, and the rest was swept under the rug.

How did I miss that until now?
TFAA apparently decided on an eye-grabbing headline rather than one which matched his article. It probably works, but it's sad: his actual thesis is that media queries are insufficient or the wrong tool.

As acabal notes, the core issue is that CSS was originally for styling documents, and media-queries work in that framework: they're about laying out or formatting a document, not a component within the document.

Which is of course the wrong approach if you're creating distributable/reusable components and blocks. Media queries are not a hack and are probably necessary: the final author will use them to lay out his site/page responsively.

But they're not sufficient, because the inner layout of a sub-element is impacted more by the element's size than the viewport's (the sub-element's positioning and size on the other hand are affected by the viewport).

All in all, the article is a good note of a real problem. But its headline stinks for the usual reasons.
Next thing you know, your phone homescreen is showing a full-size ad. Clever.
I don't install non-work IM programs on my desktops anymore because I found that an 'online' status typically denoted to people that I'm available to talk. It got to a point where my wife was even pinging me too often. Then I just put it on unavailable/offline all the time and then what's the point of having it in the first place?

I think the younger generation doesn't have an expectation of non-invasiveness yet. They just aren't doing anything important enough to be bothered when interrupted. I think that changes when you get a little older.
Why is email/password more attractive than billing information (credit card or bank/savings account) to hackers? What's the end goal here? I would assume that it's some sort of monetary compensation? With an email and a password, you might have access to someone's banking website, but you have to guess which bank they use and you have to assume that they used the same password. It doesn't seem practical to do a massive scripted attack against a bank's website with a possible list of emails/passwords that may or may not exist on a specific bank's web site.

Now, credit card information on the other hand might be useful. There's a black market for credit card numbers, especially if they include the verification code (CSC/CVV/etc).

If hackers have access to a site's database that contains user authentication data why are we to assume that the hackers didn't have access to payment information or that they didn't have a desire to access it?
Maybe I'm extrapolating from nothing here, but it's interesting to see that some of the ideas that shaped his career have been with him for a while.

Most notable is his "The Web" applet, which is a sort of extremely elementary prototype of Facebook:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021201160011/http://www.angelfi...

Similarly, his remark on his drawing tool page:

"The Internet has some effect on almost every person in the world. However, it is fairly uncommon for a person to have an effect on the Internet without going through the long and tedious process of creating a website"

It seems like from very early on, Mark was interested about how to a) make the web a place for anyone to express themselves, and b) that would allow people to perpetuate their real life relationships.

Again, I may be just reading too much into things here, but I feel that those are interesting thoughts.

I wonder what links people would make between my teenage programming projects and my current work... :)
There was a link: http://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/

I think you are looking for an exact quote but the link is to slides of a talk :(

I also agree with the sentiment, but you Architecture Astronaut will no doubt disagree.

You really can't just take a design pattern and apply it blindly across languages. I spend far too much of my time on a C# application where I have to deconstruct anti-patterns and make them more amenable to change.
Don't be deterred by the negative comments about the unstructured data. It's a tough problem but not an impossible one. I know because I'm also battling the same question building a free-form NLP based self tracking app to help track daily data ( http://thyself.io ). The problem for me is that it's hard to perform analytics when one datapoint is in "miles walked" and the other is in "laps ran".

As you said, conventions help mitigate the problem a little bit but the end user can hardly be expected to stick to best practices.

I have hope though. This is a problem worth solving.
Lessons from Geo Bootstrap, Our Successful April Fool’s Gag
From Wikipedia, the point of the CALEA is to require telephone companies to add in back channels, not software companies [1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L...
Also, the comparison on the project's README is informative (and lists additional options):

https://github.com/BYVoid/continuation#relevant-projects
People worry about what the NSA knows, but you should be worried about what the DEA knows.
Adding A New Color Picker With WordPress 3.5
I didn't say I want it for free. I'm just not a big-enough customer with deep enough pockets to have some customized solution built especially for me by heroku.

It doesn't mean that other people like me wouldn't be interested in something like this if it existed.
Really, all this needs to be opt-in only. That's the only way to proceed that's respectful of users and not redolent of the stench of malware.
No need for archive.org, it's still up and running: http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/
Is there any word on if facebook will be including advertisements in this at all? It looks very sleek, but having ads come up would be a huge deterant.
Another overnight success story.
Learning rails' internals by building your own mini rails
I don't think a launcher app like Facebook home can be associated with the Android home button automatically

Automatically, no. But it will give you a prompt that will allow you to set the home button to go to Facebook Home.
Yeah and thats only for single vcore. Maybe for 2 vcores. Do you really need 420GB for single. How about half that and give me another vcore.
So, he went from Angelfire sites that had big java eyeballs follow your cursor...

to a website where the worlds' governments big eyeballs follow your cursor..

great
Keep your gemfile slim - view the entire dependency tree for any gem
I didn't mention a "right" tool, I actually made sure to use the term "better", because "right" has those negative connotations.

For our purposes, there are "better" tools available than those that were chosen. A pain that we're feeling now, a couple of years on, as we start to migrate a live application to those other platforms. That's a big loss of productivity for us because choices were made to use tools that were familiar instead of figuring out if they actual made the most sense.
Why differentiate? I see FB as a phishing exercise, a specific app may be more like spearphishing.
Up-thread there is a claim that the keys are embedded in the processor during manufacture and cannot be read.
> Most notable is his "The Web" applet, which is a sort of extremely elementary prototype of Facebook

Right on point.
The fastest (at least in term of terasort) hadoop platform?
No need for archive.org, his site is still up:

http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/

Interestingly, he seems to have gone and re-implemented parseInt and .toString() in JavaScript for his base converter, instead of using the built-in functions: http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/conv.html
Yeah, I've shared that sentiment for a while now, but it was the turn of phrase that pulled me in, and I wanted to know whether to attribute it to Peter or Brendan.
This looks pretty neat. I might end up installing it just to avoid using the abomination that is the official Facebook for Android app.
I wanted to stay in school for the social life. The master degree was interesting as well, I can't say it was time wasted. I have no regrets. Thinking about the PHD now.