skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a PSA for people running Debian servers: Subscribe to the debian-security-announce list[1] and you'll get these notices in your inbox rather than at the top of Hacker News. I got an email Sunday afternoon so when I saw this I thought ... another vulnerability, already?!

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
The quantified lives of others
I disagree with you at this point. When using TDD we tend to do a better code design and we avoid to write unnecessary code.

Take a loot at http://www.ime.usp.br/~aniche/files/tdd-and-design-draft.pdf
Learn from failures: Here is how to do social
Four things that piss clients off the most
You were wrong and you got called out. Now you're moving your goalposts, and your response still stinks since (unless your point was to note that France had to import electricity to meet heating needs from Germany, thereby externalizing the costs of their electric heating).

The original poster had a much more accurate statement since transportation and industry is so weighted towards refined petroleum products and cannot/can not practically be substituted with electricity.
Would you be interested in contributing to port Firefox OS to new platforms? Firefox OS can use Android kernel and drivers, so the hard[est] part is done. Doesn't mean that it's necessarily easy, but if you want to run Firefox OS on your hardware of choice, it is at least theoretically possible.
Pitch Review Software is a Home Run For Ball Players
Not false. There is currently a federal prohibition on anyone making machineguns at all (military contracts of course exempted); if Raich had been ruled to the contrary, it would have applied to Stewart in such a way as to remove machinegun construction from the federal prohibition IF the item in question remained entirely in-state, consequence going so far as to restrict the federal government from prohibiting felons from making them (as Mr. Stewart was, in fact, a felon convicted of making a novel home-brew machinegun). Thus, the federal government would have permitted felons to home-build their own machineguns.

We were talking about federal laws and courts. I assume that in a short blog post I'm not expected to address the proliferation of overlapping jursidictional priorities and conflicts. But since you insist on taking the discussion where it wasn't going...

Fact is, majority of US states do permit machinegun ownership, so long as it complies with federal law; thus if federal law permits felons building machineguns (so long as it remains in-state), majority of states would not prohibit it. Now that the discussion has clarified that the remaining prohibitions would occur in a minority of more than four dozen states, and that the federal government would have at least had no say in the matter (as opposed to compulsive legalization in all encompassed jurisdictions), and that the discussion had not been addressing state laws (or if it did, it was that the applicable state ALLOWED the activity), that for most practical purposes the one-sentence summary of the horribly verbose & convoluted verdict in question and its consequences was sufficiently accurate?

(Pardon me. I'm getting increasingly irritated by exchanges that amount to: "X." "X? You're WRONG because you didn't address minor tangential issues Y, Z, P, D, and Q in comprehensive detail, all of which had little to do with the discussion at hand.")
And the best part is, in the huge amount of speculation around that crash, I never heard anything that came even close to what turned out to be the real cause of the accident. Which is part of the reason I think people should really stop speculating about this crash.
Anyone know of the Ubuntu packages that are safe here?
> It would be interesting to see a global equivalent emerge, maybe built upon bittorent DHTs/magnet links. Maybe one already has, e.g. on Tor?

GNUNet [1] is very similar in technology to Perfect Dark (at least from what I can tell based on the description in the linked article). I'd even think that the design of Perfect Dark is based on the same research that GNUNet is based on. See for example [2].

[1] https://gnunet.org/

[2] https://gnunet.org/svn/GNUnet-docs/WWW/download/ecrs.pdf
My fear is that now that Google controls a significant part of HTTP traffic, plus the client side of the story (Chrome + Android), it is in a condition to force things in one way or the other...
As somebody who's worked with volunteers quite a lot, there's always a risk that the people that end up interacting with the public aren't necessarily ideal representatives of your project. I wouldn't necessarily assume that one person's opinion is a fair representation of organisational policy.
What can your technology do ?
Oh, it's 26?
In that case, they have not missed my recent I/O optimizations :)
Working With New Code
Let’s Make Genetically Modified Food Open-Source
As the article said, stop speculating. You don't know it was caused by human error. Wait for the data to be analyzed.
I think in the real world its not "HTTP/2.0 DRAFT" but "SPDY".
What can go wrong when the government builds a huge database about Americans
The UK Government Digital Service still kicks its ass at (a) startup methods) and (b) execution :-)

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

https://www.gov.uk/

https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples
A blog post about the process would be fascinating, and probably something that many on HN would be interested in.
Tangential:

Back when I was studying music, I took a class by the brilliant David Noon called "Stravinsky," on... Stravinsky. Dr. Noon presented a very early work of Stravinsky's (when he was in his early 20's, I believe) and noted that it was incredibly unpromising -- amateurish, banal. Note, 20 is really old by typical composer prodigy standards, so it's somewhat amazing that within a decade or so, Stravinsky went on to write masterpieces like The Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring.

Another fascinating thing about Stravinsky is that he re-invented himself several times, moving from his brilliant early Rimsy-Korsakoff like style to spare neo-classicism, and then on to atonality. As someone who's moved from music to software development, I find that inspiring.

I mostly mention this to encourage those who may have started down their paths in life atypically late.
So, does that mean it's safe to say that Erlang must copy the memory of values sent as messages between processes? Or, is there some kind of locking of such (aliased) message data???
It probably already exists, but you could write a telnet that simply displays ASCII and hex side-by-side. I used something like this when I used to reverse engineer laboratory device control protocols (but it was a hardware implementation: http://www.atecorp.com/ATECorp/media/ProductImages/R/HP-Agil...)

Not to mention wireshark...
DragonCon Finally Separates From Founder Ed Kramer
An argument that it's a fake issue: the fact that best-practices compliant HTTP applications already tend to run under HTTPS, and that understanding what's happening at an HTTPS level in operationally-relevant ways (namely: are we performant enough? and are we secure enough?) already requires parsing of that binary protocol.
Does anyone know of any good books/sites to teach basic electronics to kids (or their parents)? Thanks.
From my machine shop background:

1) .gov aka "G-job" means you can't talk about it, maybe even to your boss. Maybe you're making the left support bracket for the Manhattan project, no one in 100 miles knows what you're actually building. Maybe no one knows everything about the whole program. So you're kinda on your own in the machine shop, kinda.

2) Wanna build a model steam engine at work? Tell them the crankshaft is a classified part for some contract you can't talk about and they're not cleared to even see the blueprint.

3) But screwing around for fun doesn't have to be made to the tolerances for real a-bomb parts... So "close enough for govt work"

The other story I heard from oldtimers who were there, was there was an intense push in the early 40s to shovel as much out the door as possible. An automobile plant used to selling to rich dudes wouldn't dare ship a car with cosmetic issues, but tank crews don't care if there's a little weld splatter on the outside or runs in the paint, as long as it actually works in combat. And this created attitude issues when they converted back to making fancy cars for rich dudes after the war. "So there's a giant dent in the hood, the GIs don't care... Uh, yeah but we're not building jeeps anymore..."
Because for a long time we have been able to make computers run faster. Also, with all of the levels of abstraction in programming, making the computer do less could be using a more efficient implementation of something three layers deep, which looks a lot like making the computer run faster.
I suppose that's a valid concern, but note that Google's control over the protocol was already pretty strong by dint of running Google.
Can anybody summarize the main differences between this and the older versions of HTTP?
I believe that in a previous thread, FirefoxOS devs were hopeful that the way the OS is "layered" will make this less painful -- that upgrading Gecko should be much easier than upgrading Android versions, because it wouldn't introduce driver issues etc.

Updating the underlying kernel would be more arduous.
Now I understood the policy not to book more than 4 employees on same plane.
RIP
excuse me for inaccuracy - it wasn't a zero-initialization, it was a maintainer who thought he was fixing a bug because he made a compiler warning disappear, which resulted in a whole lot of zeros where there should be some random data.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number_...
http://research.swtch.com/openssl
Yeah, I hope they don't sue me, because this is just a fan remake and I love Monster Energy drinks :D
I would think so unless it stores all message bodies in shared memory and protects them with an enforced COW policy to begin with, or better yet does this with virtual memory with some clever COW mmapping.
Because if you impose tariffs on such goods, these countries will never be able to improve their standard of living. The lower standards give them a chance to produce for lower prices and thus participate in the global market. If you look at Asia, even though things are not perfect today, their standard of living is continously improving. Sooner or later they will catch up, even if it takes some more decades.

And, who knows, maybe one day they even offer significantly better standards than the western countries. If that happens, would you think that it would be ok for them to impose tariffs on western goods or stop importing from western countries until we somehow find a way to catch up?
Doctors make mistakes. Programemrs make mistakes. Pilots make mistakes.

In fact, if you can actually get an airline pilot in a relaxed situation where he's certain you won't rat him out, you'll hear lots of stories about stupid mistakes. The fact that this inevitable human error almost never results in fatalities is a testament to the level of redundancy in air traffic procedures.

As a case in point, I talked to a pilot in one of Europe's major low-price carriers. They had an incident where both pilots literally fell asleep in the cockpit and were intercepted by German jets. Apart from the jet fighter escorts, the passengers never knew anything was off.
I believe that the "world wide web" took off for two reasons. It was completely free and it was incredibly easy for ANYONE to make a website. If you needed to "compile" all HTML it would have discouraged a lot of casual experimentation. Not everyone understands what a compiler is.

Just as an example I started playing around with HTML when I was about 12 (in 1998), it was easy and I got instant results. A year or so later I tried to learn Perl and quickly gave up because I couldn't get my first script to run. It was another year before I tried to "program" again and became hooked.

HTML and HTTP were successful because they were incredibly easy to understand. I wish we could keep it that way.
The fact that UTF-8 and UTF-16 are often exposed to programmers when dealing with text is a major failure of separation-of-concerns. If you had a stream of data that was gzipped, would it ever make sense to look at the bytes in the data stream before decompressing it? Variable-length text encodings are the same. Application code should only see Unicode code points.

In general it was a mistake to put variable-length encodings into the Unicode standard. A much better design would have been to use UTF-32 for the application-level interface to characters, and use a separate compression standard that is optimized for fixed alphabets when transporting or storing text. This has the advantage that the compression scheme can be dynamically updated to match the letter frequencies in the real-world text, and it logically separates the ideas of encoding and compression so that the compression container is easier to swap out. And, of course, an entire class of bugs would be eliminated from application code.

Edited first paragraph to clarify: Variable-length text encodings are the same.
"I note that checked bags cannot block passengers from escaping an aircraft. Perhaps someone will someday quantify the additional risk airlines forced on passengers when they started charging for every bag."

I don't think this is as big a problem as one makes it out to be and here is why. There are certain things I need when I travel that I can't afford to go without in the case my checked bags don't make it to my destination at the same time as me. Things such as prescription medicine, contacts and my retainer (though not nearly as important as the previous two but still important none the less) are things I always carry on because they are things I can't easily replace if my bags are lost. Then I bring the entertainment, usually a laptop and/or a tablet and books/magazines. All of that stuff would need to be in at least one carry on.

Most, if not all, of the airlines I have flown have a limit to how many bags you can carry on. So it isn't like charging for check bags is going to have people start bringing 10 carry ons, it would have them bring the max if they wanted which as far as I know is 2 for most airlines.
This should be possible to test automatically. And if that's not possible/easy to do, it should be standard procedure to generate colour maps that can be checked by humans.
First prong of becoming an expert in computer programming is "becoming an expert in computer programming"? How can I read this when there is a syntax error in the third paragraph?
I mentioned I was a software developer when getting in touch with Hive76 in Philly. Never heard back from them.
AFAIR Bittorrent transmits IP-addresses in plaintext and thus hurts the privacy of any Tor-node that runs a BitTorrent client over Tor:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/not-anonymous-att...
> Have you never had to indicate how many bytes you are sending over a stream...

I have and I generally like the syntax to be more explicit (since I so rarely work in bytes): string.getBytes().length

You make all fair points, and I guess it is my opinion that varies then but I think the rule of least surprise would involve returning the rune count for both strings and string slices. Also, wow, range iterates over runes but len returns byte count. That's messed up.
Messages are deep-copied in Erlang. There are other techniques possible such as uniqueness types, which allow "transfer of ownership", Rust uses those but Erlang does not.
>>>>>> It's better to build a bridge that lasts for 50-60 years, and have the option value of replacing it with a better structure down the road.

And then we get to where we are now a lot faster. . .

http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-state-road-systems-2010...

"Over 90,000 miles of roads and 71,000 bridges are in dangerous disrepair, according to a 2010 U.S. PIRG study."
I still find a lot of inspiration from the earlier UI books (ideas), before everything settled down. Lots of crazy, awesome ideas. Now it's just how to books.

I've been anticipating the ZUI for ages. eg It's the correct answer for a window manager. It's the only way to maintain continuity, preventing users getting "hyperlost", kinda like what breadcrumbs try to accomplish.

Did you see the new flashy zooming Calendar transitions in the WWDC Mavericks demo? It appears to have the right balance between zooming and level of detail (LOD). Me want!

FWIW, I did not anticipate the dynamic 2.5D in the forthcoming iOS 7. That's gonna be huge.
>Interestingly, while you seem to consider that this is a weak point of Firefox, we (Mozilla) did this on purpose and we consider this one of the strongest points of the platform: _no vendor lock-in_.

There is already no vendor lock-in with html based apps on Android or iOS. The complaint people have about iOS is that it is locked down with regards to native apps. Mozilla themselves have made this exact complaint about iOS -- that they wanted to write a browser for iOS but could not because a) HTML/Javascript are not suitable for writing a browser so they have to go through the app store and b) native apps in the app store on iOS face restrictions that would limit performance of a Javascript VM, so Firefox would not have competitive performance compared to Safari.

FirefoxOS solves neither of those problems.

More generally, the idea of all user facing software being targeted to a single sandboxed standard API is very restrictive and worrying. It means developers giving up complete control to a small cabal of 4 or 5 large organisations that decide what gets standardised. Organisations that have conflicting interests and financial motivations that certainly don't align with my own. That's assuming that various competing web based platforms would even be sustainable; I don't see it lasting more than 5 mins before platform specific extensions are added to provide additional value over the competitors.

I want to be able to write software for my device and have full access to the hardware without some third party being able to decide what I can and can't do with my phone. FirefoxOS doesn't get me any closer to that goal, in fact it's a step backwards. Web platforms are great for SV startups where raw user numbers are the most important thing, but to be honest I don't give a shit about the ability of the latest photo sharing startup to 'exit'. I do care about people doing much more interesting things and all I can see is web based OSs being a restriction on that. Think about how you would feel living in a world of Gopher based operating systems.

>As you may recall, we (not just Mozilla) did this to the web a few years ago, and look where this brought us all

Yes, a world where I don't control my own data anymore, it lives on some server I can't access, subject to the whims of foreign governments. Being processed by code I can't even reverse engineer never mind read the source or modify. This is great freedom for developers and governments, but utterly disastrous for the freedom of users.
Interesting. I like the focus on creating (for lack of a better term) a work/work balance - exploring your own motivations as a key to creating a good culture.
http://www.hackthissite.org/
If they hate on this just make a Red Bull one. Their social media team is pretty good for a company that large, they'll probably even tweet about it.
Do we deploy too often?
Haven't tried one (don't have the readily compatible hardware), so can't really tell.

However, from what I've heard, it's Cyanogenmod 10 with Dalvik parts removed and some Ubuntu parts (no X11, Qt5 only GUIs) running in a sort of chroot environment. Doesn't sound much better than any other chrooted GNU install.
But lets talk about Singletons just for a sec. I am currently writing a game and I do have 2 singletons. My director class (that controls initialization and instantiation of all the things I need) and my main game scene (when the user presses Play from the menu). To me this made perfect sense.

But I can see how singletons get out of hand, but could also make sense to the developer to do so. (Meaning the developer thinks it makes sense to over use when it might not)

How do you approach the fact that maybe your game scene, layers on that scene, HUDS, all would just have a single instance ever?

I have read that singletons are used a lot in games and well games are playable (meaning they run and work) so do you ever apply "if it ain't broke" philosophy?

Your site will be very useful to a lot of people. Singleton alone.
Now someone just needs to post some article about 10x programmers. Then a bunch of people will comment on how they are underpaid 10x programmers (or phrase it as "an order of magnitude" better than their peers for bonus points). Then someone will reply with a Wikipedia article about the Dunning-Kruger Effect and bam, you've got a regular HN discussion work-flow going.
Tile: The world's largest lost & found
"You can't enter into a contract with Microsoft or a third party developer unless you're over 18"

That only applies for the United States and I guess most European countries, but it's not universal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority

For example, here in Uruguay, there's a distinction between minors up to 16 years, then they can enter some contracts (for example work contracts, I don't know where downloading apps falls), and they become full adults at 18.

In the U.S. there are some restrictions up to 21 years old, but they can drive at 16 (!). My cousin was 17 at the time I was setting up her phone, I'm not sure, but I guess she might have been legally able to enter a contract with Microsft at the time.

Google is more lax with its settings, or has better lawyers. Also, if you move to another country, you CAN change your settings (it's extremely ridiculous that Microsoft doesn't let you do that).

I can totally understand that Microsoft doesn't want to go over the minutiae of every small nation to see whether someone is eligible or not to enter a contract.

I wonder what Firefox OS will do with all these legal restrictions (offload to the app developers?)
in fireworks it's called "Common Library" but it's really useful for that kind of stuff. It also has "styles" functionality that flow through to all of the pages for element styles.
Photoshop CC: Hands on with camera Shake Reduction, and how it works
This looks like how Python3 handles Unicode. 1byte for ASCII, 2 bytes for BMP, 4 bytes for everything else.
Successful Social Media Campaigns Should Focus on Delivery
This week, a new fine, Irish client sent on an article from the Guardian outlining the importance of referrals in new business sourcing. It contains an excellent advice on implementing successful social media campaigns focused on generating referrals from real support and advice to real people.
At first glance, the spec appears to be re-implementing a TCP stack inside a TCP connection...
Yeah, the site seems to leak memory like a sieve. I had to kill -9 firefox.
Despite the "extreme inefficiency", HTTP/HTML have managed to work successfully for a very long period of time (and even worked decently well on very slow hardware in the '90s).

There is actually a binary format that much of the web content is compiled into: gzip. It's remarkably effective.

I will grant that following Postel's Law means that browsers have more work to do to ensure that all kinds of "busted" stuff on the web continues to work, but I'd guess that, at this stage, that work is pretty small compared to everything else browsers are trying to do.
You need to qualify what the idiotic/stupid moves a company would make are.

A startup cutting corners with their database backup procedures, is way different than a large corp polluting water, which is way different than leaking NSA secrets.
Yeah, be careful about that. The head of brand protection at Monster is a guy that I have had business contact with. He is one of my least favorite people I have ever met in my life and I have had the pleasure of speaking with scumbag insurgents/terrorists face-to-face in a war zone.