skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice idea, points given for trying. the first thing that bugged me was the lack of overview. I actually like a 5x10 raster (or smth similar). Second, the buttons werent directly clear to me. I was half expecting to be able to slide every part of my body in there, like building a game character (that would be kinda cool).

More importantly, my gf, as heavy online shopper (she never admits ofcourse ^_^) shot the idea. Basically the same arguments: not able to quickly see stock. Zoom is full picture, while most nowadays use magnifying glasses, etc.

In the end, nice try. Fun idea. But it is not clear to me what is wrong with current webshops showing overviews in a grid, and details on click.
So, are you saying we shouldn't have text positioning? Because I'm pretty sure that's been a feature of documents since before Gutenberg.

I can understand your gripe, but I simply don't see how it applies here.
Social Is Still Important
Problem is , as far as the browser knows you meant to copy the whole thing.

If you look at the source the actual text of that paragraph is what gets copied, they just use some sneaky CSS to make it not visible. It's not explicitly marked as hidden.
Why would I bother copying and pasting the code to my clipboard when common industry practice now is just to invoke the output of curl directly?

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)
On the plus side, it now loads much faster than the rest of the web.
I have experienced similar behavior with Firefox on Windows 7 recently. A lot of freezing and slowing down. Then I solved it by removing bookmarks from sync. I have a lot of bookmarks and it seems that syncing them is cause of freezing. If you use sync feature, try this or just unlink device (Options -> Sync).
By comparing the indexed public keys with github accounts. Should a user have both a pseudonymous account and an account tied to his or her real name, this would compromise the identity of the pseudonymous account.

Edit: To be clear, this would only work if the same public key was used for both accounts.
If I ever knew this, I'd long forgotten it. Thank you.
i think gizmo686 is aware of that. what he says is that he trusted the source where he c&p's from.
if you don't trurst the source you should not blindly copy any command. Even one flag/parameter that you might not know can do harm. There do not have to be hidden characters to make it harmful and dangerous.
Downvotes on this?

Be thankful downvotes are anonymous. You are very likely incredibly incompetent, and I fear for anyone who has to read your code or worse, use it.
Yes, but not just that. It's also important to make an effort to understand what commands you are typing into your shell before typing them (Google them first if you don't know).
Even if the shell had such protection, they could just do 'evil command && visible command'.
If the idea is to demonstrate leaky personally identifying material I'm surprised that your scraping of usernames results in only a list of usernames, and not a big database of different usernames, and fora, and projects, and interconnections.

That kind of data mining would probably be reasonably scary.

I'm not sure I understood the rest of it. The site rachelbythebay.com would have a public key for Bob from github, and try to get Bob to log in using his private key?
The reason that the web is popular is because it supports these features for design-delivery and application delivery.

You could probably implement an online text reading system with basic markup and hyperlinks over a weekend, but the problem would be that nobody would use it because it would be seen as strictly inferior to the web.
True, but an honest politician gets labelled as arrogant, and it seems that people (in the aggregate) are more willing to vote for a hypocrite.
I think the shoe fits here.

Political conservatism often draws inspiration from the works of Edmund Burke. "Burkean conservatism" is a philosophy that accepts that society will inevitably grow and evolve, but is skeptical of the ability of human beings to understand and intelligently guide society as it changes.

A Burkean is therefore reluctant to embrace new social policies, new norms, and new ways of living. Burkean conservatives argue that things should stay as they are now, or at least that they should change slowly.
Quote from the article: "So what do I ask for? A service (that I’d personally be willing to pay a nominal fee for [re: $20/yr.]) that combines feeds from nearly every social media service, provides very flexible organization of them, and is web-accessible as well as available in an app form."

The closest thing to this is Flipboard. No web app yet, but I use their Android app to read my RSS, Linkedin, Google+, Facebook, Twitter (one account only at the moment). It lets you connect other networks too.
But imagine this scenario: I'm running for office, and I opt in to the matching funds program. All well and good. But then, some extremely well-funded organization, which is totally separate from me and my campaign, spends lots of money glorifying me or denigrating my opponent.

You might argue that there's no corruption here, because I never had direct dealings with that organization, or the people funding it. But the potential for corruption is still there. Once these organizations exist, it will be clear to every candidate what he or she must do to win their favor. Politicians will have an incentive to advance these organizations' agendas, even if the politicians and the organizations never talk to each other. Further, it is quite possible (and indeed probable) that some politicians would cheat and deal directly with such organizations, even if doing so violated campaign finance laws.
Registrations sounds like a bad idea to me. As long as you have the original publication date well documented, any registration should not be neccessary.
Or alternately, the solution is to paste it into your terminal, then take the time to read over what you pasted and make sure you understand what is going to happen before you hit enter. This is doubly important if the first word is 'sudo'!!

Not only is this a good habit as far as security goes, it's also the best way I can think of to learn from problems.
This is cool, but you should really add underscore to the page, as it makes it much easier to deal with large arrays (pixel arrays being the perfect example).
Perl is also installed on virtually every server. Seems most people are using Ubuntu nowadays and it's definitely there by default (much of the Debian infrastructure is written in Perl). I believe the same goes for Red Hat.

As to your actual question, I'm not sure I'd say that Perl is better than Php/Ruby/Python. I really consider them all mostly the same. There are bits and pieces of each that is better than the others, but nothing overarching. If you know one of them really well, I don't see a huge reason to learn another one of them to the same level (unless some sort of outside influence compels you).

Perl's strength has traditionally been CPAN, but Ruby and Python both have their own copies and communities big enough that most of the stuff you look for is already there.

The Perl community's documentation is also superior to almost anything else out there. Once I've CPAN installed a package (say Template::Toolkit), I just "man Template::Toolkit" and there's a ton of documentation sitting there, including examples. The convention in the community is to put the example at the very beginning, which is heavenly, and cannot be appreciated enough.

In contrast, the Ruby community's documentation is largely a joke. It seems most of the time the documentation for a gem is in the README on github. And even then, to really learn it requires diving into the code. But then it isn't clear what is or isn't supposed to be a stable API. Perl seems to do that way better than Ruby.

Python always seems to have docs you can get to with pydoc but from what I've seen they tend to be auto-generated from the API with a lot of "FrotzBlubb() - This function Frotzes your Blubb" style non-documentation. So it has the sheen of documentation but it's not actually really helpful.

That being said, I learned Perl in 1994 or so and recently did a Ruby project. I quite enjoyed it and have been forcing myself to do new things in Ruby to keep up my language skills. I do miss the good documentation in Perl though (the Ruby community really needs to take note). Also Perl just seems faster than Ruby (I have no evidence, it just feels that way).
Thanks for reminding me how cool my geocities pages were. Flat UI meh. I got the hammer with baloon pants bringing life to my page!
C'mon... That is nothing like the industry standard -- you used SSL.
Semi-permeable standards
Is it trivially possible to determine the public key based on an SSH authentication attempt (without knowing the private key)? If not, then does it not make it less secure to broadcast it?

While maybe this is "okay" for github to publish, they run a security-sensitive service and hidden API surprises like this could give some folks the impression that they don't take security seriously enough.
Wow, I didn't know there was a federal law about this. Do you know if the constitutionality of PL 90-196 has ever been challenged? I'm surprised that the federal government is allowed to tell the states how to allocate their representatives.
This works the same way in almost any language. Numbers can be represented as decimal, octal, hexadecimal, binary, ... It's not anything special to C.
FWIW, I use shell mode in emacs most of the time and it happily accepts, and buffers, multiline commands until you hit enter, unlike the terminal.
Since site owners are often not trustworthy on petty issues like this, it would be nice if browsers would make an effort to protect from the more obvious forms of malice rather than telling the user that it's their fault if anything happens
When I was 15 or so I made this mess:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991022005707/http://members.aol...

It's a shame that half the ugliness goes away since images aren't all cached. You also have to view it on a 800x600 display for the real experience.
I'm Shmacked Launches New Website...Also My First Built Website
Doesn't the browser have a model of which text is visible? It has to. So why not copy out of that model?
Actually, since I tried to copy it by triple clicking, which selects one line (at least, I expect it to. It's what sublime text does). That didn't copy any of the malicious text, and it just stopped between the clone and the url.
This certainly advances an interesting argument. That Facebook Home could capture an Android device. It raises a really interesting question of where the ad revenue goes. Which is to say if Home starts showing you ads ("Your friend Johnny just got a copy of Halo9 want to buy a copy and play him?") that ad revenue won't go to Google obviously any more than Ad revenue collected by web sites that happen to be accessed by Chrome.

Here's my off the wall prediction, Google makes an equivalent product for Google+ but some how figures out how to credit you with the bandwidth you use while its on your home screen.

Interesting times indeed.
People still complain about how complicated it is to match parentheses and other non-sense like that.

Truth is things like Emacs' paredit are the nuts. Honestly you have to go out of your way to get unmatched parenthesis/brackets/braces when you're using paredit.

Coding in Clojure with paredit feels like you're directly manipulating not text but the AST.

People who have never slurp'ed and barf'ed Lisp code using Paredit or something similar simply aren't qualify to comment about the difficulty of editing Lisp code. As simple as that.
Yeah -- I mean, it would be easy enough for browsers to not include text marked as display:none or visibility:hidden.

But there are so many other tricks to hiding text -- margin-left:-10000px, font-size:0, color:white, and so on, that there's really no way to avoid this.

So I can't even imagine how a browser extention would 'fix' this -- no matter how clever it tried to be, there would almost always be some way around it.
I love this so much. Really brings me back to a simpler more colorgasmic/motiontastic time.
You're comparing the money raised by the Presidential candidates to all money spent by PAC's for all the elections, not just the Presidential one.

Also, WSJ has different numbers: http://projects.wsj.com/super-pacs/

Also see NYT's breakdown: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance

Looking at the NYT data, the candidates together raised $1.2 billion on direct contributions (which are capped at $2,500). Even going by the Open Secrets number, the fact is that Obama and Romney raised more money directly (with a relatively small contribution cap), than PAC's spent on the entire election for all candidates.

Now, there is something troubling about the information in the NYT article: $1 billion raised by PAC's, the vast majority of it coming from donations of more than $100k. Is it going to spiral out of control from there? Or is the dismal failure of PAC-backed campaigns going to cause 2012 to be the high watermark? Who knows.

But what we do know is that 2012 was unprecedented, and Citizens United only happened a few years ago. Was Washington broken 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago? It's hard to argue that the government is appreciably more corrupt or pro-corporation than it was in they heyday of Ronald Reagan. But all of that was before Citizens United and before the rise of Super PACs. I would assert this: if the government is broken, it has been that way for awhile. But total outside spending was $50m or less through 2000: http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/cycle_tots.php
Absolutely. It was so....innocent.

I remember discussing scientific stuff, Harry Potter, and the new online games with people on Yahoo chatrooms and IRC.

I took a look at Yahoo chatrooms some time recently (well, in the last five years anyway.) It was horrible; spambots all over the place trying to get you to click on links. I suppose all the real people moved to Facething.
The browser knows that the text is not visible, because it is the browser which is not displaying it. Yet the browser is choosing to include it in the copy. Why?
So combine it with a man-in-the-middle attack to make the victim think he's logging into a known server (hmm, they changed the server key, ok).

Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm talking about.
In this particular case, the characters that get copied are clearly rendered far outside of the area selected by the mouse (in fact, outside the visible area), so I don't see a reason why the browser should think I meant to copy them.

Yes, it's probably not easy to fix, and once fixed there are probably a dozen different ways of cheating. I'm just pointing out that it's certainly possible to fix this particular attack vector.
You sound like you know your stuff. This is kinda how I felt too; a small addendum, less is often a good thing, but least is not better. I hope the glitches will get ironed out and will apply to textareas too though. I certainly would rather send a much smaller JS file, especially for mobile users.

Is your editor open source? Any chance you would be willing to share an example as well?
I wish more people had this view, particularly in the political arena. Be who you are, courageously.

I remember reading that a comedian who gets 10% of the population to like him is a well-known millionaire, while a politician who gets 45% of the population to like him isn't a politician because he loses elections.

Politicians, especially high-level ones, need to reach 50.1% of voters, which usually means pandering to the median with bland pablum, because bland pablum can appeal to almost everyone, whereas courageous personality will often make 33% of people love you and 66% hate you.
Great that you built your first website :)

I don't understand what it is though. Some text explaining the premise might help.
As a Unity developer, I had no idea my games were phoning home to Unity HQ. This definitely seems like something that should be opt-in.

Also, maybe I'm being dense, but I can't find any information on how to turn it off or find it in the editor - could you share exactly what the option is called?
If the target used the same public key elsewhere, that ties two accounts to the same person, which may or may not help figure out who that person is.
BTW, on Google, what do you think of Eric Schmidt? Someone suggested after the anti-poaching fiasco that he should be fired: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523513
that's not paranoid; running the browser in a vm and doing a snapshot restore daily is.
We Swedes do love us some tacos. And pizza. Also that Thai stuff with the chicken and peanut sauce.

We are very international in that way.
Github's key system has you upload a public key. If I already have an SSH key generated, I'm more likely to use that than to generate a new key, set up my .ssh/config file to conditionally use that key when connecting to github.com, etc.
Thanks for pointing that out (: The blogpost explains how in learning C after years with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and Objective-C one discovers little things about CS that weren't visible before while working on a higher abstraction level.
If the text contains a newline the command[1] will be executed immediately so that won't protect you.

[1]: At least, in the terminals I regularly use.
They got around the IE stuff by saying "Requires a modern browser (tested in Chrome 26, Firefox 19, Safari 6)".

This is, of course, a synonym for "don't bother to use me in anything but hobby projects". (Or stuff which is completely mobile-focused, I suppose.)
Lots of people say they love this.

Has anyone done the HN redesign yet? There seem to be plenty of choices for voting arrows. (http://netanimations.net/arrows.htm#.UWHUTKLrwcA)
First author here. The dot product example was compiled with GCC 4.7.2 -O3 -msse4.2 -ffast-math -ftree-vectorize -funroll-loops; see the caption to Figure 5. What compiler options would you have suggested? The Haskell version only used SSE instructions, not AVX; this should have been made clear in the paper.

The more complex examples are in Section 5.2; see Figure 8. Granted, we would have liked to have done more, but deadlines are deadlines...
Perl one-liner for memory leak detection
> It cracks me up that people believe that money is the only way to influence legislators.

Not only that, but there's an overemphasis on the idea that donations are an implicit quid pro quo exchange for policy.

Let's say we could somehow ban any kind of "exchange" -- not just donations, but these other soft influence deals where money doesn't change hands directly.

We'd still have a fundamental problem: people who have lots of money can hire other people to represent their interests to congress.

Conversely, how many citizens spend time trying to influence their congressional offices? Not just via vote, not just via the occasional phone call or letter, but by actually meeting with congressional staff.
It's the merchant's duty to ensure that the person who is charging the purchase owns the credit card, which is why they'll often ask for ID along with the CC.

A stolen CC is useless if no merchant accepts it.
> Was the Xbox 360 really a huge success? It came second or third in sales for its generation of consoles. 75 million units in seven years is a small number compared to mobile devices. Android sold 144 million devices in Q4 2012 alone.

Yes it was a huge success. Even though it didn't sell as many consoles as others, its tie ratio flat-out beats[1] both the Wii and the PS3, and that's quite an important metric that's almost never taken into account, but that contributes a great deal to the success of a platform.

[1]. http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie-Ratio/G...
This isn't a solution--this is exactly the dangerous behavior that this webpage is trying to convince you not to do.

Because they can put a newline in the malicious paste.
Help – all Dropbox files gone
i woke up this morning to find all my dropbox files gone. I went to dropbox website and my folder is empty. I am writing a PhD and my latest rewrite is in there.

Any idea what i can do? contacting dropbox seems impossible.

?????? thanks
This brings back so many memories
The library writer is the "consumer" here. The programmer just uses the library, and the library chooses the proper stream representation.

Of course the programmer can also use the lower-level stream interface directly if desired, but then the programmer must also know which stream representation to choose.
I hope you are not setting up a false dichotomy in your mind between the web as it is now and an online text-reading system with no design touches.

I would want this "text-reading system" for example to have something like CSS. The difference would be that instead of creating ever-more powerful versions of CSS and Javascript, the architects and implementors of the text-reading system would pay attention to gotchas like the gotcha described in the OP (changing browsers so that what is copied into the clipboard is exactly the visible text the user has highlighted).
Instant runoff voting. Ask everyone for a ranked list of preferences, then completely ignore those preferences and only look at everyone's top choice unless their top choice has been eliminated. Numerous inherent problems, notably non-monotonicity, where voting a candidate higher can cause them to lose.

The biggest practical problem with IRV: it encourages people to vote for their preferred third-party or independent candidate first followed by their lesser-of-two-evils choice (common examples using US political parties: Green>Democrat>Republican or Libertarian>Republican>Democrat), but IRV then ignores the preference for the second choice over the third, which means voting for a third-party candidate still risks "throwing your vote away" and having your greater-of-two-evils win. So, IRV not only breaks fundamental properties that any sane voting system should have, it still doesn't actually address the single biggest problem we have with voting systems, and worse yet it pretends that it does.

I'd advocate approval voting if you need a system that's simple to use with existing infrastructure and doesn't require much explanation, or Condorcet if you have no infrastructural or political concerns blocking you from choosing the best option.
Firefox causes additional confusion by rebinding Ctrl+Insert to what Ctrl+v usually does (copying the clipboard buffer, not the selection buffer).

Also there are some cases where javascript which selects text for you causes very unintuitive behavior wrt selection buffer.
> And as someone who supports primarily insurgent candidates from outside the mainstream, the Citizens United decision was a godsend.

If you want non-mainstream candidates to get elected, wouldn't it make more sense to support proportional representation?
OCR would work ;-)
Because there is value to society if copyrighted works become public domain after reasonable time.
The Rule of Awesome
Facebook piracy
So i noticed that Facebook doesn't take down unauthorized copyright content uploaded by users (youtube finds a way locate and delete files that infringe copyrights). What's fb's policy on it? Are they taking any actions to protect copyrights?
Louis seems to be able to stay grounded despite his 'real' self being incredibly successful (and rich!) at this point. Hope he can stay that way.

Seems like so many comedians start off drawing from a real place with their comedy, become super famous and rich, lose that source, and their work suffers for it.
Whatever shortcomings the US political system may have are exacerbated by citizen apathy. By constantly asserting that the system is irretrievably broken, Lessig is contributing to that apathy more than he is fighting it.