skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to me that this article abuses the word "destroy". Nobody destroyed the Internet with a hacksaw. They took a portion of it temporarily offline.

And "prayer" has nothing to do with it. The telcos know how this works. They have procedures for dealing with it. For "a prayer", substitute the words "teams of repair techs standing by at all hours", and "a detailed cost-benefit analysis of various breakdown scenarios".

And it's a boring exercise to make a list of possible countermeasures without also including that cost-benefit analysis. Yeah, in a fantasy world where equipment and people were free, we could install a proximity detector inside every manhole and create a national organization of rapid-response security people to monitor those sensors. That might capture some saboteurs. Or at least make for great security theater. But at what cost? Might it not be easier to just fix these incidents as they occur?
Did you read the same article as I did? It was about displaying a loading spinner over the top of the Apple keyboard. It is an interesting article and I'm going to look into it a bit deeper. I wonder how Apple views their method for enumerating the view objects to find the keyboard? They seem to be a bit touchy about non-standard ways of doing things.

As far as updating your app goes, it is easier to update your current app to attract new users and better reviews than it is to start a whole new project. And some of us do take some pride in our work, so fixing bugs is a moral imperative.
I would argue that simply encrypting the "sensitive" files leaves too much room for human error. Yes, the majority of crooks would not spend a lot of time looking for such material, but in the off chance they do, would you really want your entire business destroyed? Full disk encryption with a 20+ character password is the only way to go for laptops, in my opinion.

Also, if you're running windows, full disk encryption actually speeds up most tasks. On my linux box, boot time slowed down, but 200 MB random reads (typical for starting large applications) were actually only slightly slower:

before: Timing buffered disk reads: 246 MB in 3.00 seconds = 86.24 MB/sec
after: Timing buffered disk reads: 246 MB in 3.00 seconds = 81.96 MB/sec
Actually a gun is involved.

Suppose UAW workers fail to show up to work, and the CEO fires them and hires replacements. In that case, men with guns show up and shut down GM (it's illegal to fire striking workers and hire replacements).

Also, if negotiations break down, men with guns may show up and broker an agreement (mandatory arbitration).

Unions, as they currently exist, are based very strongly on using threats of force against non-union workers and employers.

The CEO of GM did, in fact, have virtually no choice in the matter.
Are the News / Tech / Gossip pages simply custom lists of people that are followed?

This - you don't seem to explain exactly what news/tech/gossip actually is or how you define breaking. Maybe for a non-twitter user they don't care but as a twitter user, I do. If that's your secret sauce, I still think you need to find some way of helping visitors understand just why your 'news' etc categories/lists are authoritative.

I like the idea of a lens on Twitter though.
I am one of those pseudo-intellectual book-clutching atheists and I must point out that your idea of free thinking is wrong.

Free thinking means you're free to make up your own mind, not free to be brainwashed by your parents.

Also, I did not know intellectual attacks could be vitriolic and scathing. They can be hard and cold, though.
If you have limited time, concentrate on MixMax's first point-- being worth talking about. It's all about the story and NOT about the algorithm. Read "Made to Stick" (the book) to understand the recipe for press-worthy ideas. I'll summarize it for you: To be a sticky idea, it needs to be simple, concrete, credible, trigger emotions, and have a STORY arc. You can read the excerpts page to get the gist:

http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

They MIGHT have done it with PR talent/relationships and outreach... But quite possibly all they did is craft their story well. The "green" stuff is really hip right now, so that gives them a HUGE leg up.

(we've gotten ridiculous PR and blog coverage and not once did we ever hire a PR pro or email a reporter)
In my opinion as far as software companies are concerned, the gap is bridging. As computer/internet user base from India will increase the gap of consumer will fill up.
For instance few years ago we didn't had and e-tax filing website, but as e-return are catching up, few players have come up in this market as well.
Is there a rationale for doing this, other than "because it's there"?

AFAIK the problem with running existing PHP apps on App Engine isn't the PHP part. It's the rest of their architecture. I've only ever seen two kinds of PHP apps: The ones that are tightly coupled to the LAMP stack or a very close equivalent, and the ones that should have been written in some other language.

But maybe someone else can enlighten me.
Hmmm, I just looked on my Google App Engine account, and I can't see how to use / enable PHP. I see the link to quercus, ... can someone add some details to how to use it?
Nginx also supports server-side includes: http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpSsiModule
Venture Capital Fundraising Is Down Nearly 40 Percent In First Quarter of 2009
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
To some extent I do agree with you, but in my opinion the problem is a little different. The main problem is that, the gap between software companies and college is very wide. During our course we don't even know what is happening in software industry. This gap can easily be bridged by making some sort forum where student can have a direct contact with live software firms.
The Truth About Celebrity Detox Diets
few points:

monetizing a tiny url service != monetizing twitter

is google adwords really a viable monetization strategy for startups?
This just seems distasteful. A university should not be a business, because businesses will always default to whatever makes the most money. And sometimes, this is not the same as what is best for the students.
For people who don't know, DNA Lounge is run by Jamie Zawinsky, who is one of the few people who can claim to have created modern web browsing -- he was one of the core programmers at Netscape when they first got started. Got tired of computers, and then built a nightclub... full of computers with free internet access.

I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me thinks it's a great idea -- after all, bars in Japan run pretty much 24/7, so you can go (quite literally) non-stop all weekend. On the other hand, my wallet hates me for this.

I'd probably be all for no last call whatsoever, provided that SF had better public transportation, especially to the South Bay.
My last company refused to install IE7 on the corporate images and only allowed people to use IE6. You can imagine that as someone developing internal web-based tools this was quite frustrating.
History Of Online "Experts"
Yes, it's fun to drag the brush and feel, smell the painting, mixing the colors... even just going to buy materials is fun. Painting for hours to get a picture you never had idea you could is also fun... enjoy

As it's fun to crunch numbers for hundreds of thousands of text documents with a Ruby script and then getting the results into R language and throwing amazing graphics of an algorithm correctly classifying them.

Yes it's about the results, and it's about the process.
In terms of widgets that pull all the conversation together, we just released a WP plugin that does that for posts (twitter, digg, reddit, hacker news, friendfeed, and related blog posts) http://www.backtype.com/plugins/connect. There is also a tool called ConvoTrack (it was built using the BackType API), it's a bookmarklet that shows you the conversation around any page. It can also be embedded on a page as a javascript button. http://convotrack.com/
its strange that all comments are from Indians. It would be great if someone from US gives their opinion on it.
It's also actually used just by people who want to measure which links people are clicking on.
I am taken aback about this and other negative comments about debugging. I love debugging - the thrill of the chase, the dodging out of blind alleys, the moment of triumph when you track the bugger down, the know-it-all closing of the bug report...

Takes all kinds to make the world I guess :-)
There's a number of good reasons to use redirecting URLs for affiliate links. Reason one being click-through statistics.
If you're a native speaker, your brain knows which sentences are allowed and which sentences aren't. Anything else is optional.
Wow this would be great, I have more than 7 months wondering when they'll enable it as more than 1,000 comments were posted on this issue.
If you do this, be aware of the security risks associated with SSI.

Read the relevant part of: http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/wwwsf3.html
I agree on the Link Rot Apocalypse. I've seen services like URL Tea vape to be sure, but bigger services like TinyURL are rather more stable. In fact, I use TinyURL a lot to link to news stories, and many's the time I've followed a shortened, descriptive link back to news sites to see that the sacred "canonical" link now 404s.

People are overstating both the ephemerality of shortener sites and the longevity of original URIs.
a) It's hard to argue that the FMV is less than what the VC paid for it, though.

b) ISO/NQSO's are income only when exercised, not when vested. When the stock price is expected to climb (such as when you can vest pre-IPO and you're pretty sure you will IPO), then it's wisest to exercise as soon as you vest to start the clock on long term CG holding period, but the key moment for the IRS is exercise, not vest.

All of the above reflects only my understanding of US tax law from being a (non-founder) employee at 3 past startups with some kind of public exit (two acquisitions and one IPO).
Reading computer-related articles in mainstream media always makes me notice how out-of-touch some journalists are with the area and I wonder if all the articles they write are equally out-of-touch (in economics, politics, ...)
Erlang workshop videos
Man-Month is great book. Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained is the second one. But those are mostly about management of software projects.

If you want to learn how to write good code you probably should read about how to write short stories and even Dale Carnegie's Speaking For Success.

They are really useful.
Media always distort stories. But of course this makes you wonder how come those people can grill you during interview with all questions that you can't answer seems so imbecile.

Of course to design an algorithm to find a good smaller color depth that closes to original color depth is not an easy engineering issue. I guess it is this part that the reporter messed up the story and made it sounds so ridiculous to techies.
AdSense ads in a framed URL shortener... How is this a good thing? Stop framing content--it's that simple.

This is most likely against the AdSense TOS anyway--you're putting ads on someone else's content.
Javascript works fine for that thanks.
Ultimately, if you want to discourage shortener services, you need to make short, meaningful URIs.
I used to work in politics (and now I work in tech). When I was in government, every single time I read an article about something that I knew the behind-the-scenes story of, I found some major factual error. Every single freaking time.

Now it's the same with tech, and it really does make you worry.

Note that this only applies to mainstream publications; the specialty/trade press does a great job in both areas.
I agree. Though it'll be interesting to see the direction it takes. India doesn't have a lot of small to mid-size tech companies - the true "disruptors". Business in India seem to be one of 3 types: 1) Huge offshoot of American company 2) Huge family house (Reliance, Tata, Birla, etc.), 3) mom-and-pop.

The first two have tremendous hierarchies and face the same disruption "problems" that any American company faces. The smaller mom and pops don't have the resources to compete.

It's hard for me to see where the Teslas, the Segways, even the MySQL's step in.
4. Use "they" as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun.
It seems really strange.

But, sometimes Google engineers have huge blind spots. Often they are just general purpose smart engineering students. I've met plenty who couldn't deal with piping on the command line. It's barely plausible that nobody on the team even knew there were GIFs with smaller look-up tables, or the overhead involved in dithering or making smoother transitions.

Come to think of it, I bet this is what really happened: they were reusing map tiles from Maps and didn't even consider making their own. So, maybe this guy built a whole new tile generation pipeline for mobile, or figured out some way to remap colors from existing tiles into a smaller look-up table without sacrificing too much quality. That could be legitimately heroic.
If I just wrote 100 lines of code, and it works the first time, I get scared and cower in fear.
It may not be easy but it's a well known problem. I seriously doubt they did it from scratch.
Well Google adwords will get you from the point where you can start to make money until you are big enough to deal directly with the advertisers. That is not a small benefit.
Is that all? Given all the doom and gloom I was expecting something like 95%.
I wasn't even aware @import existed, and I don't really see any redeeming reasons to use it instead of 'link' anyways, as 'link' is "cleaner" and is HTML and thus can reap all the rewards that linked javascript, image links, etc. enjoy. Can someone please explain?
normally this should be against Google Adsense TOS, that don't allow ads to be posted on Iframes or Popups; unless they have an authorization from them.

I don't think, that's a good idea, how the ads can be targeted?
Also how much traffic gonna you have to make earnings?
He properly had the knowledge that the eye could not see the difference, or that the phones did not display more than 20 different colors.

But yeah that quote isn't the best.
Does Merlin take his own message very seriously? Take a look at his personal blog:

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/
Public relations (p/r). A good p/r person or team can work wonders: provided that you have something useful or interesting.
Thunderbird | Hot Rods Pictures and Wallpapers
Log out from every account that might have an XSS vulnerability? That's a tall order. You don't know what an proven-untrustworthy site is going to do before you visit.

I suppose I could visit with lynx/curl/etc., if my curiosity were strong enough.

But either of those strategies are a lot of trouble for very little payoff.
Easy Install for PoolParty
I'm not sure about GAE, but as to Quercus in general: You get to write in Not Java while your employer gets to deploy on the JVM.

This is huge.

Take Jython for example: Put jython.jar in WEB-INF/lib/, add a small stanza to WEB-INF/web.xml, write a WSGI-compliant app in Python. When you're done, you can zip it up and deploy it on Tomcat. None of the existing infrastructure needs to change, and you get to write in a more expressive language. That's how we'll sneak better things into enterprise.
I find the app store to be highly competitive. The competition drives down price, which drives down incentive for developers to put too much time into a single app. This provides what many consumers are looking for on the device: $0.99 apps that will entertain them 5 minutes.
I highly recommend his book (or wait for the upcoming 2nd edition), it is filled with invaluable stuff like this. Really an eye opener for me.
Interesting cross-links between this article and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559411
Interesting cross-links between this article and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559655
Hey, that is totally cool. No need to respond in any meaningful way! Everyone's different. And it doesn't sound corny at all. I know exactly what you mean actually, since that's how I feel about writing music, which is hard work by any standard but I just lose myself in the joy of it.

I'm not even trying to complain or anything; I program a lot and don't avoid it at all, I'm always writing little scripts for this or personal experiments for that. It's just that I don't find the process particularly fun in the way that you perhaps mean. I appreciate the power, I love having the skill, but the main driver is the outcome.

Takes all sorts! : )
Ubiquity + Craigslist
Check the video at: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
The linked series of blog articles on the-programmers-stones.com goes into great detail about the stress process.

They were written from the context of: "Here is how to build a team of rockstar programmers out of otherwise ordinary programmers, if you can create these specific necessary conditions." Talk about a competitive edge right there.
Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?
This submission is inspired by a quote from my previous submission.

Suppose a group of alien beings were to learn our language and randomly selected you as a source of further human knowledge. They send one of their kind to your home and the being informs you that it will be crashing at your place for a few weeks to learn whatever it can.

I realize this scenario is rather contrived, but what reading material would you provide to such a being? Remember that this being likely does not have the contextual knowledge that would be required to understand your favorite books.
That's true, but I think the author was talking more about the rules of written English, which aren't always so available to your brain. For example, when I'm speaking, I never need to ask myself whether I mean "they're" or "their".
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that they use a spell checker on this document and catch egregious errors like "Los Angels" and be it;

FURTHER RESOLVED they hire a decent copy-editor to notice further egregious errors like "closing tie."
This is a very cheap way to figure out which associates aren't interested in working hard enough to become partner.

Identify them for $80k and then let them go.
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:
I don't see how this makes sense to anyone. People sending links can't make any significant money from this. Plus it pisses people off.
I think your argument is valid, sometimes you get more out of learning something when you're forced to learn the alternatives and edge cases that don't matter in a learn-as-you-go approach.

However, take two job candidates:

One of them just has a CS degree, let's even say it was from a "prestigious" university or whatever. No internships, no computer-related jobs, no open source / hobby projects, nothing else except good grades and dubious academic rewards.

The other has no college degree, but has spent 4 years working various junior positions / contract jobs that pertain directly to the job in question, mentioning several cases where they wrote/maintained software in a production environment. To even the field, let's just say they don't have any open source / hobby projects or otherwise "outside" experience.

They are both asking for the same salary and are "equal" in terms of team fit and other non-technical factors. Who would you hire? This is ultimately the point I'm trying to make.
$60/hr for 2080hr/year (assuming 40hr workweek) == $124,800/yr - plenty of developers would take that.
Since this manifesto came out his output has slowed significantly and it's hard to argue that his posts and blog are "better" than they used to be.
Good vision, good post.

Yes, all those so-called social networks are just about an ability to say something, because it makes you feel a little better for at least several minutes. The feeling is what matters, not the content itself.

In 2000 - 2001 the livejournal.com service gained a huge popularity in Russia among mass-media and hi-tech workers. It were really good times.

It was a possibility to say something aloud, and to feel this so necessary feeling of being not alone, which, of course is mere an illusion.

That is why facebook got their 200 million users - I see them each day in those internet caffees in Thamel, uploading all the same almost identical photos and writing almost the same banal stories.

Self-exibition as another time-killing and keeping-the-mind-busy process, why not? Twitter is also here.
Better than a password, I would venture to say that this would closer resemble a public/private key system. Suppose the bank could run several tests, and learn the tendency with which your ear reacts, rather than recording a single response. I am making some assumptions about how the ear works, but I'm going to guess that it doesn't send the same response to every stimulus.

For authenticating, the bank could then send a randomized sound every time, and listen for an expected response, which is in effect your ear's signature on the input sound. This way, a thief wouldn't be able to bypass the system by simply obtaining a recording of your ear; he would have to be able to mimic its responses.
I wonder how digg consider itself 'Driving a lot of traffic'!

Before the Digg Bar, I can't know how much traffic 'Made Popular' articles make, I asked a power user, he told me from 50K to 100k in just few hours. He told that it would cost you $500 if i want to get it in Front Page. But for that while I have nothing to sponsor and also $500 are not few money.

Now with the digg bar, I realized that Front Page articles can make 80K but generally that make as low as 15k and 8k.
So Digg really now don't worth for traffic.

Another reason, Digg is bad, how come an article hit the Front Page with only 2 comments on it??
Best "hole in one" I ever had.

(I am not a programmer, feel free to submit this to the dailywtf, or coding horror, or make fun of me and call me ugly if you want to).

There was a huge huge huge file that I was trying to run a perl script against. The [text] file was about 3 million lines long. What my perl did was split it out into a CSV file so that I could actually work with it (the person sending to me sent it as a space delimited file that didn't really follow its own specs, or have any explanation about what was going on...blah blah, it sucked)...

Anyhow, my perl (stupidly) was doing:

foreach $line (<file>)

{

do_something;

}

The problem was that it kept coming back with an out_of_memory error. The other problem was that it wan running serially (is that a word) on an 8 core box....it would peg one proc with the perl, but the other 7 would just sit there being lazy.

My (very hackish/duct tape) solution was to split (which should have been a big hint) the file into 8 pieces, then call the perl for each one of the 8 chunks...8 cores, 8 threads...should be full of win, yah?

I used wc -l $filename to find out exactly how many lines were int he file, and then gave my new perl script that as the number of lines for each file. The new script did something like:

foreach $line (<file>)

{

print FILE1 $line;

}

(there was a couple of if statements so that after it hit $num_of_lines / 8 it would go to file2 file3 file4 etc.

After that mess was all finished, it would call a shell script that did:

magicscript file1 > file1.magic &

magciscript file2 > file2.magic &

etc. etc. etc. until it was done, then it would do

cat *.magic > fixedfile

which I could then work with...

I put all this into another shell script that did

echo "FULL POWER TO MAIN DEFLECTOR (this could get messy, look out!)"

perl engage.pl

by some miracle it worked on the first try!!

I have since fixed this mess of code. At the time it was a "we don't have time to do it right, just DO IT!" moment, so...whatever :).
So this is basically one very big hack?

"Content cache and session management don't work." That's a pretty big drawback for me. Are there any performance issues?