skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A sophisticated storage method that takes advantage of, but does not require, browser-specific support? Sounds pretty great, but I think they could have some more gradation in their fallbacks:

- Between 'DOM storage' and 'non-permanent storage', it would be nice if there were an intermediate implementation based on cookies or something.
- It would be nice if the SingleThreadedMapReducer used called setTimeout to simulate the "does not stall UI thread" behaviour of Web Workers.
Things to remember on a job interview
philh's post about (about yes's "y\n") gave me a tip. Instead of repeating the random character, do this:

cat /dev/urandom | sed 's/./ &/g' > /dev/audio
Ruby Performance Roundup: GC Tuning, MagLev, MacRuby
You can do meta programming in Assembly too, but it is much more common in Lisp.
BBC iPlayer serves nearly 1000 requests per second with Catalyst
Scientific America had a good article on creativity: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unleash-your-crea...

Brief guidelines for creativity:

1. Get a good system for capturing and preserving new ideas without judging their merits.

2. Challenge yourself. Challenging problems will force you to use more diverse skills.

3. Learn. Become skilled in more than one area.

4. Manage your physical and social surroundings. Get to know a diverse set of people. Make sure your day is filled with interesting and novel things.
Sixth nucleotide found
Since someone suggested in the YouPorn job thread that YouPorn might be the largest Catalyst, Django, or RoR site in the world, I figured this one might also be interesting.
A link to the original was posted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562447

This article specifically quotes the first point:

> Delete redundancies. Say it once. That's enough.
> If you're repetitive, the reader will stop reading
> and start skimming. (Like you probably just did.)

As I said in that first submission, I stopped reading at this point because it's blatently wrong. Intelligent geeks hate things repeated, but I've found that in the business world if you don't say something at least 6 times it won't get heard.

Know your audience. Decide whether repetition is required. Don't follow overly broad advice blindly.
ditto...I have met Freeman, he is a good guy, and he's been through the startup grind and is entrepreneur-friendly.

The area around his apartment is walking distance to a great complex with a ton of pan-asian restaurants... pho, korean, huge chinese grocery store, malaysian, chinese.
I see CNN and Kutcher already got 1M followers.
My mom, dad, sister and brother have all separately asked me what the keychain was. I would get many more calls if it was more complicated.
New Car
It is certainly easier to be creative when one has reached a high level of proficiency at one's craft.

Sugar Ray Leonard can pull off dance moves in the boxing ring, I keep my hands up and my jab out or I'll get my head knocked off.
Ancient Microbes Under Antarctic Survived Millions Of Years Without Light Or Oxygen
While I see your point, I'd argue that some expressed creativity is easy to see. I'd argue that an accomplishment in a domain marginalized in a person's environment requires some creativity.

When I am not in school, I live in Colorado. So the skiing there is great. So if I found out someone had been a competitive skier at some level, I would not be shocked. If I found out that someone had lived in Colorado while successfully competing as a surfer, I would be shocked. I think that being able to effectively train as a surfer while surrounded by mountains would show some creativity.
google "debian openssl fiasco"
An example, in the 60's through the 90's, many economists created entire new fields of economics by applying it to other domains and vice versa. Economics + math produced game theory. Richard Posner, a judge, started the economic study of the law. Others, such as Olson, Buchanan, and Tullock, noticed that the theories of economics could be applied to the government as well as the market, and public choice was born (and Nobels were won). Lastly, psychologists got involved in economics recently, spawning the new discipline of behavioral economics.
I don't get it. Isn't `|i|` the shorthand version of a lambda binding an i? And `lambda { i }` a lambda not binding anything? So why is the result surprising? I must be missing something.

Edit: I mean in

each { |i| p i }

the |i| stands for a shorthand lambda, that binds an i.

And in

for i in 1..3
p i
end

there is no such binding. So where's the problem? That 'for' should use a lambda?
Depends on the field. If you are a musician, empirically I would recommend drugs.
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That's the idea of patents as I've understood it.

However, I guess it hasn't worked well even before our times when trivial programming solutions, plant seeds, indigenous herbs, and probably soon-if-not-already DNA are being patented.

I happened to browse through the history of steam engine on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_steam_power (because pg mentioned it in http://www.paulgraham.com/revolution.html... :)) and one thing caught my eye: each time some significant steam engine related patent expired the steam engine business expanded and spread rapidly.

New ideas were combined with the previously patented ideas and new constructs became commonplace. I think that companies and patent holders, too, realise that patents are rather useless and they would all be better off without them. That is because nobody has successfully lobbied for longer patent periods in the last 100-200 years or so.

In contrast, the copyright has been extended tremendously because companies can actually make money because of it and have lobbied for decades to keep Mickey Mouse off the public domain. Makes me wonder.
US company wants to transmit electricity from orbiting satellites
It's a good backup solution as by the time Googlebot finds the cracked pages, it's a bit too late.

I'd set up a cron job to check the database once a day or 12 hours or so. That's more pre-emptive.
My submitted proposal to invest NYC’s $3M angel fund
http://bitbucket.org has had issue tracking for ages.
You should have used the permalink: http://xkcd.com/570/

Your link to the main page will soon have another cartoon on display.
as someone put it:

after a dmg comes an OMG ;)
Somewhere out there is a company that has actually figured out how to enlarge penises, and it's helpless to reach potential customers.
"Stereotype threat", the proposed mechanism for this "intervention" functioning, is not reliably reproducible in experimentation.

Also, come on -- a ten minute lesson repeated three times adds half a grade level two years later? What kind of fairy dust were you sprinkling during that lesson? I'd like some -- you can probably cure cancer by sprinkling it on someone eating a carrot and stop the Israel/Palestine if you sprinkle it on a Palestinian and Israeli forced to watch The Odd Couple.
I want to block all adverts, except search engine ads, which are sometimes useful and never prevent the page from loading.

In practice, I only use AdBlock+ and FlashBlock to block ads; if I used GreaseMonkey too I could probably filter out ads in GMail and Facebook, that appear as part of the html.

I would pay my ISP to filter out adverts.

It would be interesting to find out how much sites would receive for the ads I'm not seeing, and whether I'd be prepared to pay that much not to see them.
Weird. I would guess that would be browser/configuration dependent? I use firefox for this, and whenever I load up a flash movie (to be honest, I haven't tried it with anything else), it sits in ram until it's loaded, and then it gets cached in /tmp as a file named something like Fla[0-9a-z]+ .

In about:config there's the options:

browser.cache.memory.enable

browser.cache.disk.enable

and related settings. Disabling the memory cache might let you grab it.

If I get the spare time today, I'll see if I can't get the swf to pull out.
Lungs breathing outside of the body
Pirate Bay Loses - Courtroom Leak from “Trustworthy” Source
The Programmer's Paradox: The End of Coding as We Know It
Those are some pretty damn good passwords, too. Just goes to show a good password doesn't mean everything.
The way Facebook counts users, you access an application and that counts as a "usage."

30% of Facebook's active user base, in other words, have never clicked on a photo? It doesn't make sense.
Also posted 14 hours ago here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565600

Perhaps discussion might be better directed there.

Mods - feel free to delete this comment.
Yoda complex? :-)
Fedora servers were indeed hacked if I remember correctly and malicious packets were uploaded but it was detected before they reached the users.

Repo security is certainly very important. But well, ultimately you have to trust someone?
Radish - Indoor Solar-powered Calendar Display
Summary: he stored all his passwords (for servers, Gmail, Skype, AIM, etc.) in allinfo.txt on his web server.
Five rules for getting your ideas off the ground
My point was that Java fosters and promotes the stupid, immature and strategically wrongheaded thinking of those management sorts. The entire premise of Java from the start
was "You don't need to hire smart people now!".

and this "business process manager" thingy is built with Java. A ginormous timesink to hide the fact that nothing of value is being produced. So it sort of is about Java, being the root of this "enterprise" mindset.
I think it's a great idea, but too many people have beaten you to the punch. I googled "email yourself reminder future", and just from the first page of results I come up with:

http://www.futureme.org/
http://futuremail.bensinclair.com/
http://emailfuture.com/
http://www.hitmelater.com/
http://www.resnooze.com/
http://www.emailfuture.com/
http://www.mailfreezr.com/index.php

So what makes your site better than those?
The reason why EventMachine doesn't work in Phusion Passenger is probably because of forking. You can use the :starting_worker_process event in Phusion Passenger to reinitialize EM after forking (see the docs on spawn methods) or use conservative spawning.
Stiglitz Says White House Ties to Wall Street Doom Bank Rescue
Was it because his passwords were so long and complicated that he couldn't remember them? Irony.
Ask HN: Why are contracts written so poorly?
I have been working on writing a contract/proposal. So I compiled the things to include in contract, then I looked at a template to write them down formally.

However, I have been going through this template for over 4 hours and still unable to understand a single line because its just so bad english.

I am kind of irritated & angry at the same time. We are all told that we should write proper, concise, accurate and clear. But when it comes to writing contracts where everything should be crystal clear, we have to revert to writing jumbled up phrases, 10 lines long sentences and highly complicated words.

I feel that there is a huge gap between how people/companies interact with each other now and the formalities of paper work. Perhaps an opportunity of a startup that would introduce a new way of writing contracts
College Works Painting
Hire trained professional college students for home improvement jobs such as painting.
I'd love to see posts about this side of things: how did you build that business, what were the challenges, etc.
for my $a (1..2) {
$b = 2;
}
print $a;

Prints nothing. (Of course, with warnings or strict this complains about both $b and the second $a, as they're either never used or undefined.)

Block scope is very nice. Maybe I don't use enough other OO languages to really grok why you'd want it any other way. What's the benefit to having method rather than block scope in such a context? I don't remember hating not having block scope in Python when I switched for about three or four years, but I didn't really use it in Perl at that point either, so I might miss it now that I do.
I don't think I've ever really seen a web-application responsible for so many strange and interesting projects. I feel like every day I hear about someone else experimenting with twitter.
Open Source Robotic Arm
I don't think it's that much of a miracle - Cobham's "The intrinsic computational difficulty of functions" covered it pretty well - or least explained the intuition behind why it's a pretty sensible idea - and he (along with Jack Edmonds) pretty much defined the complexity class P.
And what I'm suggesting here is to simplify the keychain process by adding information. I know that sounds strange, but imagine, instead of a vague window saying "Please unlock keychain blah blah password," you get one that says "Fluffy Bunnies Screensaver is requesting your permission to do things that may harm your computer. Fluffy Bunnies Screensaver is likely to be infected with a virus. [More information dropdown arrow]

[Quarantine Fluffy Bunnies] [Continue running Fluffy Bunnies without granting additional permissions] [Grant additional permission]"

[more information dropdown] = "Fluffy Bunnies Screensaver has asked for permission open your computer to connections from other Internet users, run programs downloaded from the Internet without informing you, and install a program that loads when the computer starts. These actions together fit the pattern of behavior displayed by many viruses.

This does not necessarily mean that Fluffy Bunnies Screensaver is a virus, but if you don't understand why Fluffy Bunnies Screensaver is requesting to do these things, please try to run the program without giving it these additional permissions; the permissions Fluffy Bunnies Screensaver has requested may not be necessary for it to work properly."

Only if you click "Grant additional permissions" does the password input field appear/enable. Additionally, below the password box, a listbox also appears with (by-default-checked) checkboxes for each right that the program has requested. If you wish, before confirming your password, you may disable some of the rights, without disabling others. This may, theoretically, allow you to run an infected Installer program (that requires elevation either way) without actually being infected by a virus attached to it. (You might still be infected if the Installer installs the virus.)
Pirate Bay officially loses case
Hommage: Haskell Offline Music Manipulation And Generation EDSL
Summary: Everyone received 1 year in prison. They plan to appeal, which means the final verdict could take years. The website and tracker are staying up.
The canonical example is http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

But I guess that there are two ways to feel really secure : either use openbsd, or just don't use the internet.
Thanks to these guys and ones prior to them (ShareReactor) we now enjoy free content on Hulu and other sites!

I no longer use Bit Torrent, but do thank these guys for forcing old media's hand!
I am surprised that the site and tracker is still staying up. I was under the impression that the prosecution was also going after the site.
Jeff Hartley On Terracotta 3.0, Performance And Scalability
This verdict wont change anything for file sharing (may change a lot for their operators) but this will only serve to push file sharing further underground and make superstars out of its operators.
The problems with contracts are that they are written for lawyers by lawyers. Not the actual users of the documents.

There is a 'plain english' style that is much better than the standard legalese.

http://www.cap-press.com/books/1476
Serving global content is easy to scale, since it's very easy to cache and easy to distribute across a cluster of computers. The real challenge comes when you have to serve and generate different content for different users and you can't use a global cache.

It sounds to me that they are serving global content - - and doing this, 1000 req. pr. sec is not that impressive and almost any framework tied to memcached could do this - - or even better, setup nginx to use the memcached module.
However, I have been going through this template for over 4 hours and still unable to understand a single line because its just so bad english.

Contracts are not actually english, although they may contain familiar words. Contracts are actually a kind of code designed to be run in a courtroom. Many of the silly sounding words and phrases are actually reserved words in this code and have special meanings.

Sometimes the obfuscation is deliberate on the part of the legal profession in order to keep them all employed. (At least there is no incentive for them to make it simpler.)

Don't feel bad. Imagine how a lawyer would feel if confronted by a large perl script that his entire livelihood may or may not depend on. :)
Yeah, my bet was more on fines and forcing them to shut down the site rather than jail time.
At least Piratebay isn't closing down:

"As for the fate of the site, Peter has already promised that The Pirate Bay will continue. The site itself was never on trial, only the four individuals listed above."
> Apache2.2/OOperl/Catalyst/memcached

What is OOperl?
Maybe people could just agree on a canon of shorthand phrases (in clear english) that expand to legalese mumbo-jumbo. Then slap a huge disclaimer "this document uses ClearContract[tm] shorthand" on.

Seriously though, this problem is not limited to contracts. Most of the law is written in a convoluted way, because there's so much legacy code in there, and also because codifying real life is just such a complex undertaking.
I don't think anybody is suggesting it's a miracle, or only possible with Catalyst. Just an interesting story of scaling a dynamic site using off-the-shelf Open Source components.
I sometimes wish it was as simple as saying "this contract to be interpreted in the spirit of the following examples", and then a small summary + examples.
Blah Girls: Why Isnt Ashton Kutcher Pushing It on Twitter?
I'm generally not envious of people living in the bay area, but these sorts of events do sound very cool.

Anyone want to have a HN BBQ here in Padova, Italy?:-) I'll supply the wine - my mother in law works at a high school where they sell it by the liter. Yeah, you read that right:

http://padovachronicles.welton.it/2008/09/23/winemaking-scho...

Anyway, they sell really good fresh meat too, so, seriously, anyone stops by this area of Italy, I'd be happy to get out the grill.
They will appeal and the trial will be drawn out for months if not years. And even if they finally lose, the servers and the infrastructure will not be affected - they withstood raids, DDoS's, server moves, etc. This will only serve to make the structures even less obvious. "Organized" filesharing, anyone?
> Maybe people could just agree on a canon of shorthand phrases (in clear english) that expand to legalese mumbo-jumbo. Then slap a huge disclaimer "this document uses ClearContract[tm] shorthand" on.

Well, they already use include files, so why not? :-)
I'm not certain, but I think it's their way of saying, "We don't have any of that crufty Perl you used to see on those awful 'hotscripts' type sites. We only use the good stuff around here."

Because Perl is a multi-paradigm language (supporting OO, functional, and procedural, and most Perlmongers use a little of all three in any given program), some folks consider it worth mentioning it when the paradigm they use most is OO. I'm a little suspicious when I see explicit mention of OO Perl, as I have to wonder if that means I couldn't use functional Perl idioms (which are often quite nice) if I worked in their shop.
I used to read an article 'How to be creative'. This is the updated version:

Ignore everybody
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html
Or play it:

http://www.gwap.com/gwap/gamesPreview/tagatune/
Motorola Adventure V750 Verizon
Motorola is never a company to rest on their laurels. Even though they have been releasing amazing phones for years they never seem to run out of ideas. The company is always looking for ways to incorporate the newest technology into a phone with supreme styling.
In my experience, Googlebot crawls all the freaking time if your site changes "all the freaking time".

So basically theres the possibility that you'll be crawled before your daily cron runs...
Readable V2 has launched.
Huge improvement.
I wish someone invented python for contracts :)
About time. Never really liked Lighthouse.
I know this sounds weird but try to imagine yourself hallucinating. Try to imagine what could be the most weird thing you could do with something. Try laughing at yourself when you think of useless and most off-the-beat ideas with a thing. Observe your trajectory of thought.
Seriously.

The South Park guys caught on, and with every single episode available on their site, why would you even bother to pirate the episodes?

Side note: Even when people were pirating their stuff, they were just happy that people liked the show.
Pirate Bay founders found guilty
The admins are savvy enough, and they've previously relocated the servers to other countries before, so I have no doubt the site will continue.
You could do this kind of serving in Ruby on Rails, Django or any other framework. Nothing really interesting, other than it's Catalyst - which for me does not make this any more interesting - - especially also since they use memcached caching to take down the load.
Correction: The U.S. now enjoys free content on hulu and other sites.
You see, I don't get it. Contracts specify a deal between two or more entities. If these entities disagree on a matter, they can go to court. The court can decide the matter based on terms in the contract.

If the contract is not in legalese, but is in normal clear English, a court should (and I'll assume it would) decide the same way. If the "clear English" is somehow ambiguous, the court should decide it in the spirit of what parties most likely meant when they signed the contract. It can determine that on little clues in the language, but also on accompanying letters, or even on what is considered normal behaviour in the same kind of situation.

So, why doesn't it work like that? Why is everybody so afraid to write clear English which describes what we mean?

I look upon this with a foreigner's eye. I have no problem reading most Dutch contracts and even laws that come my way. It takes longer to read than an average news paper article, but I can figure it out quite easily. I'm well educated, but I don't have a law degree.
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They should go to jail since they are making big money out of other people's copyrighted work.

And hopefully they will.
Ask HN: Please review my Hybrid Mail Site BlueMailCentral.com
http://www.bluemailcentral.com

Hello, For some time now HN is the first site I open each morning thanks to the Submits from everybody. Well, right new my new site is live and i really would appreciate your feedback. Both positive as negative.
BlueMailCentral is a Hybrid Mail solution, you can send a real paper letter to any country in the world from your PC and we print the letter in the country of destination. Currently you can open an account and send the first letter for free. So feel free to do so.

Thanks in advance,

Colin
Here's how I do it at $10/month:

Step 1: Buy an account from a hosting server in USA.

Step 2: Install your own proxy server.

Step 3: Enjoy hulu and others :-)
Ah, right. I picked up the OO part from them using Catalyst, so I thought mentioning it as part of their stack meant they used something other than mod_perl.