skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html

I like this article much better. Covers more topics with more detail.
> Yes I would - it's not rocket science, though I'm not really interested in satisfying your demands for internet proof, sorry. If I were hiring a web designer I'd prefer one who was familiar with HTML and used it to design up to final templates over one who didn't, though of course I'm sure there'd be exceptions - there's no need for dogmatism about what makes a good designer.

There's a huge difference between being "familiar with HTML" and what I described. It's this difference that can make or break a number of projects, especially when you're working on big budget jobs for clients that require legacy browser compatibility.

> Specialisation also has drawbacks, and it's quite possible to be a bad specialist, just as it's possible to be a mediocre generalist. That doesn't mean that all generalists are incapable of producing clean HTML or good code, or that good designer means that they don't do development, and they stick to photoshop.

It's possible, but they're often the exceptions that prove the rule. Either way, it's a huge stretch to call a developer specialising because they do "development".
Breathing pressurized air in vacuum is not such a good idea.
> The HTML5 requirement stops YouTube apps from having any control over the experience

That's demonstrably false. Have a look at the "Jasmine" app for iOS - it's way, way better than the official iOS client, despite using the same HTML5 API. It does NOT, in any way, provide a degraded experience compared to the official app using.

> and instead execute whatever javascript comes from the Google servers, sight unseen.

Well, yes. Microsoft also doesn't vet the videos it is going to show - google might instead stream rickrolls. Google is not asking Microsoft to execute arbitrary javascript (which allows e.g. stealing credentials). They're asking them to use an iframe, which is perfectly sandboxed. And they actually need to run javascript for functionality - I don't know if you've noticed but Google keeps adding features like captions, annotations, multispeed, multiquality, etc - they need to run code so they can add more features and make them accessible to all.

> Google is refusing to provide a real API that deals in discrete chunks of data, where the consumer chooses how to interpret them. Even though Microsoft is willing to display ads or presumably do anything else Google asks for that its own apps do.

Well, Microsoft is refusing to let me sell Windows Premium addition DVDs for $10, even though I'm willing to pay them the $0.50 that a DVD costs, and displaying their logo and whatever it is they do themselves when they sell a Windows equipped computer on the Microsoft store.

Do you realize how stupid it sounds? Google/YouTube is not a charity, nor a utility, and not even a monopoly. They're accessible on Windows Phone, and they're happy to have Microsoft play according to the same rules they set for everyone else. I understand Microsoft is really not use to playing by the rules, granted - but that's hardly Google's fault.
Interesting project (not sure if I would really like it as a service, though -- I think I would personally prefer a library).

Either way, looks like your signup-form has some peculiar ideas about what constitutes an email address, it keeps asking me to input an email address when I type in:

choir.io@s.hypertekst.net
Blackberry's BB10 OS uses the Web interface. It actually works quite well. Firefox OS also uses the web interface.

Microsoft's YouTube app on Windows phone is actually really nice. It's a pity Google keep trying to stop it.
>> http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html

I read that article, and while i don't fully agree with it, there seems to be at least a grain of truth in there. He talks about how VB programmers are no longer wanted because VB.net is hot stuff now (the article was written in 2007.) He also talks about how one's professional knowledge counts for lesser and lesser as a programmer, and how a lack of any barrier to entry has resulted in a field flooded with cheap workers with no job security or general social prestige.

I consoled myself thinking this won't apply to the more sophisticated programmer, who is well trained in algorithmic and mathematical thinking. For example, writing machine learning systems, advanced statistical analysis or kernel development etc. DO have at least some barrier to entry, and these are not things that a random script kiddie can learn in a "x for dummies" book. Can a more senior engineer comment?
Around 8 million Windows Phone devices were sold last quarter (March-June 2013). That's quite a few nobodies.
"Please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is'.”
- K.Vonnegut Jr.
> An open API gives consumers an equal footing in terms of the API. It doesn't affect any other part of the business.

When you get to define terms, that may be. Here on earth, you're just making no sense whatsoever.
I cried with laughter the first time I read these. Some of the most creative euphemisms I've ever heard...
Deterministic quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits
I believe Bertrand Russel would have replied:

"Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery."
In principle, I agree. However, since the bubble crashed a few years back, real estate prices have been going down like crazy in many places (both US and Europe), because of the reduced demand.
You are correct. You can simulate this by filling your lungs with air at 10 m under water and then rise quickly to the surface while holding your breath. It would be analog to filling your lungs with 2atm at sea level. Boom.
I recently spent 2 months in a shipyard. IMO, working in a shipyard is comparable to working in a factory. Yes, a lot of the workers seemed poor, but they were nowhere near living in the same conditions as the poor 50 or 100 years ago. If you keep the definition of poverty a percentage, then by definition you will always have poverty. If you decide if someone is in poverty based off of living conditions, than it's gone down drastically in my opinion. My opinion is limited, to get a better one, you'll have to ask someone who's been alive for 150+ years.
I agree, I think we should be charging all speeders with attempted murder.
> An attacker would have three primary avenues of attack:

That's not true. You've identified 3 avenues of attack, there are far more. That's what threat modelling is for. It does not appear that this project has properly considered the threats associated with the attach surface area, but lets look at these three.

> For 1), virtual machines provide strong, hardware supported isolation of the host. They can't access the filesystem, resources, or hardware of the host, only their own.

Not true. The isolation isn't as strong as you think. Most virtualization software provides avenues to share information between guest and host. Code is still executed on the same hardware. Virtualization isolation is extremely hard to do correctly, and even the pros[1][2], have got it wrong in the past. Even Java's had sandbox issues, as has Google Chrome most recently. It's believed that VirtualBox may have been affected by this[3] bug, which is in Intel's 64-bit CPU architecture, not the product. I say may because it's really hard to confirm without sitting down and writing an actual exploit for the bug.

> For 2), virtual machines also provide strong protection from the denial of service of host resources.

That's not true. Yesterday I was testing a simple windows fork-bomb type attack (putting %0|%0 in a bat file to be precise) and the VMs were all suffering, as was the host. You can limit available resources in a VM, but that's neither here nor there - what happens if you open multiple VMs? How will the virtualisation react?

> Network services, 3), are the largest attack vector not protected by encapsulation within a virtual machine.

They're not the largest attack vector by a long way (arbitrary code execution by virtualisation escape is the most significant attack vector), but lets talk about netowrk services. Just because packets could be inspected, modified or discarded doesn't mean they are. If I deploy a malicious VM to your computer and you start it, that means I'm executing the code of my choice in a virtualised environment on your computer on your network. Nothing will change that. You can sandbox parts of it to reduce what can be done to other components and it'll be down to the integrity of the isolation and sandboxing, but unless you start removing instructions, arbitrary code is exactly what my VM executes on your system.

Architecturally, it's a bad idea. If you were meant to execute native code on a system from a browser, it'd be supported across multiple browsers and OSes as part of a spec. Even Native Client (NaCl)[4] has it's detractors and has made mistakes (possibly addressed in Pepper), yet seems to most likely do enough to support what this project proposes to do.

[1] - http://www.cupfighter.net/index.php/2009/07/blackhat-cloudbu...

[2] - http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Jan/341

[3] - http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/MAPG-8TVPQL

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

I can understand the dream and the goal but it doesn't stack up. It's dangerous stuff. Stop it.
This is an excellent project, congrats.

However, it is in no sense "new or unique" as the authors suggest. Extensive (20+ years) of research literature on data sonification is out there, so...

http://www.icad.org/knowledgebase

Note also (very many) art-led sonification projects, turning everything from live IP traffic to gene-sequence or x-ray astronomy datasets, carried out since the early 90s. Prix Ars Electronica may be a good place to look for these.

My summary of the field in general, FWIW, is this - it's trivial to turn a realtime data stream into sound. It's slightly harder to turn the stream into either a) music or b) non-dissonant sound streams, and it's very hard indeed to create a legible (ie useful, reversible) general purpose sonification framework, because auditory discrimination abilities vary so widely from individual to individual and are highly context-dependent.

Of course, because sound exists in time not space, there's no simple back-comparison of data with and relative to itself, as when one looks at a visual graph. Listeners rely on shaky old human memory: did I hear that before? Was it lower, louder? And so on.

That said, I remain fascinated by the area and propose that a sonic markup language for the web would be interesting.

Sneaky plug: My current project (http://chirp.io) began by looking at 'ambient alerts' until we reached the point above, and decided to put machine-readable data into sound, instead of attaching sound to data for humans.

Good luck, and I very much look forward to hearing more!
Xbox.com PC Marketplace will be closed as of August 22, 2013
You don't understand it? You can't fathom why Steve Jobs gets a movie and those guys that you need a CS degree to recognize don't? Keep thinking.
Another example: a lot of old code bases use "goto" for error handling. I'm assuming the Linux kernel still does this. Now we've formalized that behavior into exceptions.
He's not saying that actions don't have consequences. He isn't saying that speeding wasn't idiotic. He isn't saying that he was never provided with the opportunity to know better.

He is saying that murder is a stretch.
Thank god this kid will be spending many years behind bars. How else would he ever realize the mistake he's made? Without charging him with murder, he'd surely continue driving recklessly after gaining a taste for blood.
A major American city is officially fed up with Comcast
Why do you think that is? Is it because Google have a large team of engineers who have developed a proper security programme for the project and realised that doing 2 and 3 are bad and that as a result of that and other problems with diong this that 4 is necessary? There are reasons for these limitations.
> Look at android being open source but with closed development.

But it's still an "open" system by everyone's definition of the word - the source is open, the API is open, everyone is welcome to use it and make changes. It's just that Google is not obligated to accept them into the official tree. Who cares how the development process looks like? Android is open, and claiming otherwise is foolish. e.g. Amazon's Kindle Fire version of Android.

> The property of being 'open source' applies to specific copies of software. All that 'closed' stuff you were talking about is applied to non-public copies so it has no relevance to the discussion of the open source copies.

Do you actually have an idea of how the GPL works? Because what you wrote here indicates you do not. SourceFire (the company that makes Snort) used to provide the source under the GPL, but then continued to develop it and provide PUBLIC copies without source. No one, except themselves (as the right holder) could legally do that. That does not make the open GPL versions any less "open source" or "open" in general.
Given one, the other is implied though. Only the limit will have to be set accordingly.
My Jekyll Setup (Feel free to share yours in the comments.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit

There are a lot of advantages to this idea, but it is not without tradeoffs. For example, for these sorts of suits to work properly they need to be in contact with all of your body. Any gap, between your toes or your legs... and you will have problems. This can be overcome but you basically end up having to tailor each suit to a particular astronaut. The suits currently used on the ISS are not specially tailored, they basically just have "small/medium/large" (though they have a greater variety of sizes for gloves).
> At 70, your body is generally not able to do the same things you were doing at 20/30, at least not with the same ease.

My father is almost 70, and going on hikes with him leaves me pretty winded. Certainly no walk in the park. I'm just a little more than one third of his age. If he would do some strength training in addition to his jogs and hikes, I imagine he would be in great overall shape.

I don't think that I'll necessarily be anywhere near his physical fitness when that time comes. But with retirement or a decreased workload, I intend to dedicate more time to keeping fit and treating my body as more of a temple.

With societies obsession over youth these days, it's gonna be interesting to see how the youth of today hold up in forty to fifty years.
8 Industries That Could Benefit From Big Data - Infographic
Does your employer not send you to conferences and training? Any hack-days, "20% time" or whatever percentage or encouraging people to set up lunch & learn equivalent meetings?
From what I hear, so is Google.
Yes, but this is a hidden feature :)
> What is it that you find offensive? The part that he was a drunk? The part that he kicked another human being? The part that he kicked a woman? Would you have been OK if he was sober but kicked women? Would you have been OK if he was sober but kicked a man?

Are your questions anything other than pointlessly flippant?
Thrilled to finally see this on InfoQ -- already an underappreciated resource for technical talks. What is it about video + slides that appeals so little to people?
This is taught around day one of the mandatory theory course kids take before being allowed to even try for their licenses here. And it's on the theory tests that also need to be passed.
Yes, but this specific article is simply a matter of hanging someone with the rope they were given: Obama claimed abuses wasn't happening; NSA's own records shows they are.

While on one hand it's a bit of a side show to argue about this, it's also far more likely that people in general will see the problem if they see officials repeatedly being wrong or outright lying about abuses than to get them to accept there's an issue with "just" collecting the data.

The "just" collecting the data part of the problem is rarely seen as an issue with those who largely trust the government, as it is hard to get them to understand that even if the current government is ok, things can go rapidly downhill as they tend to write off any examples as too extreme or "can't happen here".

The best way of reigning this in, is unfortunately to focus on any too close for comfort abuses. E.g. if one found NSA staff stalking ex'es would likely get a far more furious response than NSA staff collecting data about large swathes of the population.
You'd probably injure yourself with an air tank. I wonder if hyperventilating yourself before exposure would help though.
The notion that poor memory cache efficiency is inherent with GC's is not terribly well founded. Copying collectors (like the one the HotSpot VM uses for Eden Space) tend to have great cache efficiency as compared to typical use of the C heap, where you can't relocate chunks of correlated memory together. Even mark-and-sweep collectors can do quite well for themselves.

I'd actually say quite the opposite of what you are saying: in a server environment, you often care more about throughput and mean latency (as opposed to 99th %-ile latency), and GC can really do great there. What's nice is that GC allows you to have near zero cost heap allocations and amortizes the cost of cleanup. What tends to be the problem is a lot of languages with GC make it difficult to efficiently work with the systems's buffer cache, so you typically see problems with systems that do disk I/O with large amounts of data.

I've written a LOT of C/C++ & JVM based servers. Particularly for large projects with a lot of independent moving parts and object lifecycles that are not tightly tied to sessions, the JVM based servers are remarkably competitive if they aren't disk IO bound.

There's a reason why a lot of HFT firms use Java...

C/C++ still kicks butt for tightly written servers with fairly fixed functions, and generally for anything that does tons of disk IO (though the Cassandra guys have, as an example, demonstrated one can do quite well if you take the time to get it right), and of course anything with unsigned arithmetic (seriously, when are we going to acknowledge that this was a bad idea?).
Well my heart always pounds in these situations. I hate going out because of heat. Always feel like fainting.
The funny thing is I had 100s of these "about to faint" situations but it never actually happened.

It basically gets to ~110BPM, vision starts to get blurry, kind of white as if there was a very bright light. I just sit down an it slowly reverts back to normal. Buys me some time to get to an AC'd place lol.
I kind of had it forever. Just a bit more severe in the last few years that I don't have to go out everyday, so probably heat is more of a shock.

I wish it was 17C everywhere.
You certainly aren't alone. I thought the Internet would usher in a new era of enlightenment and put an end to many of man's problems. I'm less optimistic these days, and to be frank what I do is build some pretty dull websites. That's not that inspiring. You can still find ways to take pride in putting lipstick on a pig though.

For me I'm frustrated because I find it harder now to work, and yet I'm more skilled. When I was a crappy programmer (and by no means I am that good now) in some ways I was better. Perhaps because it's easier to see your target when you know less. Ignorance is bliss and all that. The more you know, the more choices perhaps are there to be made - and that can lead to paralysis.

I ended up with RSI that pretty much spelt an end to using a computer for at least 12 months. I've tried to battle on through it. But at that moment I had a similar worry: what am I going to do?

I can't hate computers, as much as I can't hate TV or man. I loathe the time I loose when sitting beside a computer, I've lost many days. And just end up loathing myself. I'm also a perfectionist which doesn't help. Especially with programming, as there is no perfect way of writing a program. And there isn't that much of a tangible outcome with programming (but I guess that also depends on what you are writing) For example if I were to contribute towards say some software on the mars rover, or a life support machine - I might get an immense reward in what I'm doing compared to writing yet another load of CRUD.

I love it when I see simplicity, or apparant simplicity. Something like when your computer just works, compared to wasting hours troubleshooting when all you want to do is print out something. That's the frustration I have with programming - it seems like you do so much for so little.

One day in the garden and I make noticible change. One day on the computer, and the house is still a mess, shelves need putting up and the washing up still needs to be done. It's no wonder why we get frustrated.

Having said that, I don't know what your work is. But for me, most websites could be replaced with a one sized fits all solution. Think of all that time saved.

If all the precious hours programmers labored instead were spent putting the world to rights - we'd have a far better world! Lots of talent in my mind is being wasted. But perhaps people are just happy being occupied.
When command links are taken down, you're gonna need autonomous drones, not humans.
The resistance for autonomous killers is political/ethical, not technical - so as soon as they're really needed (i.e., a single serious combat incident with command links failing), they'll get a chip upgrade to continue combat themselves in case of comms breakdown.
Communication is a very important skill - it's vital that a dev can communicate their thoughts to other people. If you want a productive team, having people who understand how to communicate is critical. But, ultimately, you can get by without that skill as a developer. I know many, many developers who do. Acting like a black box - specification in, working code out - can work for a developer. You'll never go very high up the corporate ladder, but some people are fine with that. Consequently, I think there's something more important that makes you a brilliant developer if you have it: Organisation.

If you want code that works, is maintainable, it easy to understand, to read and to use, employ someone who is naturally well organised. Badly organised code is the number one thing that makes projects late and products clunky. Little things like maintaining variable names across code blocks, using the same conventions across entire projects, actually commenting and documenting things, writing tests before writing code - those are organisational skills, and they make the difference between a good project and a brilliant project.
An American Dream Story, With A Silicon Valley Twist
Fun times in bash, but very boring in the Inferno shell:

listen -A 'tcp!*!9000' { {req := "{sed '/^\r$/q'}; echo 'HTTP status and headers elided'; echo $req} & }
NSA Spying: The Three Pillars of Government Trust Have Fallen
Site kinda sucks and is annoying to use for those of us that prefer textual resources and the ability to flip through slides ourselves without clicking around a teensy tiny 1-px sized gaps between slides.
Current visual systems are worse by Mark One eyeball - but they'll get better. At that point, a drone brain can do everything a pilot can, and more.