skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nokia 5800 YouTube Client
I misinterpreted your phrase. My fault :)
TinEye image search helps ferret out copyright ripoffs
Attack On a Significant Flaw In Apache Released
CTM author Peter Van Roy: Programming Paradigms for Dummies [pdf]
You called him a "homophobe", and I provided a link that shows evidence to the contrary. A link to an article with a comment by you, so I know you've had the chance to read the comments.

I stand by my accusation of FUD, and add one of trolling, as well.
What was the quality of user like for mIRC?
Does it also disturb you that Amazon.com's page about this book is designed to make you want it?
Let's say, your brain groks ruby better than python and you feel more productive with
it's "flexibility". No need to dismiss the hard work of python developers over the last couple of years as "weaseled".

Maybe this "flexibility" you talk of is not all that cracked up to be for most of the programmers. Python flourishes because it too is opinionated in it's ways and a lot of people tend to agree with the set of choices made by the language designer.
"Elitist cack"

Not at all. It's like a short, basic aptitude test before you're able to join a recreational sports team, or maybe a driving test. Just shows that you know the ropes at least a bit, you have at least basic competence.

Remove that and people can just bomb in on anyone's conversation in real time, from any browser, no consequences, nothing. Is that really what you want?

I object to your use of the word "elitism". Someone's basic technical competence, and the effort they've put in to do something, is a pretty reliable guide to the quality of their contribution, whatever it might be. When I see someone has a free blog on wordpress.com or what not, I instantly assume they either do not care or do not know how to set up their own system. When I see someone with a hotmail address I assume they do not know better. And on irc, when I see someone using mibbit, I assume they do not know how - or are too lazy - to set up IRC.

If people can't put in this basic effort, why let them in? You can yell "elitism" all you want; I prefer to think of it as "rules of the club". Anyone can join the club, they just have to pass the first, very easy, test. What is wrong with that?

And I think your use case for the service, as described in your anecdote, is likely to be quite atypical. I doubt the majority of Mibbit users just happened to be using it because they were using someone else's computer. You are the exception to the rule.
That is true but the fine is rather excessive.
Still working on computers though.
The "never fully lose its value" refers to DRMed pay-every-month schemes like the Zune:

"""
It reminds me of a recent Penny Arcade comic which mocks Microsoft’s Zune Pass, which offers unlimited selection of music for 15 dollars per month; since time never ends, this technically amounts to infinity dollars. Since the music is DRMed, if you ever stop paying, you lose all your music.

It’s just a joke, but it makes a good point. How much is one song worth to you? How much is it worth to the author? How much is it worth to the recording industry? You can push arguments to favor each side, and ultimately you can always claim that a song never fully loses its value and it can therefore be set to an arbitrary, insanely high amount of money.
"""

So, in context, it's talking about month-to-month plans, not resale-of-copies value.
Here's another take on SQL injection detection, which delves into the query language a bit more, including a formal analysis:

http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~madhu/tissec09.pdf
I think it'd be interesting to see how far they'd get if they developed a sense of curiosity. They might end up being really specialized (like say only studying dance), or they might end up discovering that everything's rather interconnected and end up being generalists.
In what way are they making it more secure? Mibbit already implemented the WEBIRC protocol - how does the Freenode client go further than that?
I do not know how you can call yourself a geek if you can tolerate boredom 3 or 4 times before even considering making a program instead. For some reason, you (and others here) assume efficiency is an attribute of geekdom. I suggest that efficiency is actually a contraindicates geekdom.

Being a geek is more about fun, it is not about how well you can optimize.
About the same as any other client that makes it difficult to mask your identity via open web proxies.
No causation is being suggested in the headline.

Also, reciting this as a mantra ignores the fact that correlation correlates well with causation. (Since causation implies correlation).

Basically, correlations need investigating and explanation. They can arise by chance, but the likelihood of that can be derived from the data (sample size, control for bias etc).

If they don't arise by chance, then there's likely to be "something going on". The fun part is working out what, but in general you start from a correlation, produce a testable hypothesis and test it.
i second the David MacKay recommendation. its a real pleasure to read. for me personally, his coverage of the fundamentals of information theory was amazing. the proofs are easy to follow and explained well so you can match the intuition to formula.

i'd also like to recommend Boyd & Vanderberghe's book on Convex Optimization (available here http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/). This is maybe a little less fun but very deep and still well written and 'illustrated'.

My background is in ML and I came to realize over time that a lot of ML is just statistics and optimization theory rehashed by computer scientist.
Wikipedia Gets Ready for a Video Upgrade
Personally, I'd prefer to see reasoned responses to sho's comments, rather than sniping remarks ("elitist cack"), and downvoting into oblivion.

I tend to agree with sho, and alternative, reasoned viewpoints would be enlightening.
people can just bomb in on anyone's conversation in real time, from any browser, no consequences

This is rather misleading. Mibbit may be a browser-based client, but it does pass on the user's IP to the remote ircd, which means exactly the same protections exist as for any other irc client.

Incidentally, having personally written the software behind an irc network that's bigger than freenode (I wrote justin.tv's chat server, which has had a peak of more than 360k concurrent clients connected), I would trust Mibbit long before I would trust a bunch of other clients. MIRC, in particular, is plain nasty.
That's process, not planning.
This blog posting is more of a nonchalant personal statement by the author. Your retort is longer than the original posting.
http://ideas.al3x.net/

Alex Payne's Open Ideas: he's publishing his notebook of "someday" ideas

http://twitter.com/al3x/status/2169778627
Check Out "Mathematical Tools for Physics" by James Nearing (available as a free download at http://www.physics.miami.edu/~nearing/mathmethods/). It covers a lot of great results and is one of the most easy to follow comprehensive summaries of an undergraduate math education that I've come across.
T-Mobile in the Phoenix area is really good. I am getting pretty tempted to jailbreak my iPhone and go back to T-Mobile. Plus, it will be nice to use my dev G1 with 3G speeds when I switch over to it.
But how do you get the fish into a barrel?
I posted my follow-up thoughts here:
http://ejohn.org/blog/unimpressed-by-nodeiterator/
Freenode manages their web client directly, which means that they can:

1) Manage it directly, immediately, and independently of any third party as to quickly respond to abuse.

2) Directly trust the web client's reporting of IP addresses, which is the primary form of unregistered user identity management on IRC.

3) Perform proxy detection on incoming web client connections, which they already use for non-web connections (http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#firewall)
Overall it is a good looking and fairly slick first pass at this. It would seem that you are on the right track for a simple account management system.

That being said criticism is the best way to make a product better so here are things that I would change:

1. Do not force the user to enter a dollar sign every transaction. If I want to say "10 sandwich" assume that because there is only one number that is the dollar amount. It does not seem like much but it saves two keystrokes for every entry. It's the little victories that make a user feel good about using the service.

2. Make the please wait windows go away. It is very jarring. That task should be handled in the background and updated via some Javascript.

3. Get rid of the flash and use a Javascript library for the graphs. Unless you are offering video there should be no need for flash.
Look buddy, I've worked as a writer and aside from missing an apostrophe on the 'it's' I didn't make a single mistake in my word usage or my punctuation, so don't troll me on it. Commas are used however the writer sees fit and in the paragraph you take your third point from, they were elisions not clauses.

I wasn't talking about your paragraph either, I was talking about your use of block-capitals. I generally don't waste my time picking apart peoples sentences unless someone has offered to pay me for the service, perhaps you should consider doing the same.

As for my use of retarded, it isn't an offensive word, I know many if you'd prefer to hear one of them. However, I wasn't even using it in an offensive context. I'm fully aware retard is used as an insult, but I didn't call you a retard, I said we, as in the HN community, are not retarded. I was merely stating that you use of block-capitalization was insulting, because you assumed people on HN cannot understand basic grammar!

@2nd edit: Regardless, everyone has a reason for using block-capitalization, but it never justifies it.
great!

"Disconnected from server: Connection to IRC server lost: Buffer overflow"

Mibbit has never done that to me...
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(1) and (2) both boil-down to saying "we don't trust the operators of Mibbit to pass on the IP address accurately". Do you have examples of the IP address being inaccurate?

(3) makes no sense, assuming you do trust the IP address, so doesn't add anything more than (1) and (2). You can already perform proxy-detection if you have WEBIRC and you trust the reported IP.
In a similar vein, anyone interested in this should also check out: http://php-ids.org/
Google Wave: A Complete Guide
Montana city asks for social network logins on job application
This is rather misleading. Mibbit may be a browser-based client, but it does pass on the user's IP to the remote ircd, which means exactly the same protections exist as for any other irc client.

First, it's considerably easier to find open web proxies than it is to find IRC-capable proxies, and Freenode runs proxy detection to catch use of IRC-capable proxies.

Second, trusting Mibbit's IP address reporting is a tall order, equivalent to peering their IRC servers with Mibbit, as it would allow Mibbit to readily spoof basic user identity.

Incidentally, having personally written the software behind an irc network that's bigger than freenode (I wrote justin.tv's chat server, which has had a peak of more than 360k concurrent clients connected), I would trust Mibbit long before I would trust a bunch of other clients. MIRC, in particular, is plain nasty.

What 'trust' must be divested in end-user, per-user desktop IRC clients? Mibbit must be trusted to report user identity accurately, to not allow proxy connections, and to quickly respond to abuse while not causing freenode's volunteer's undue labor.

Most importantly, freenode is privately owned and managed, it's not a public service and has no responsibility to provide service to Mibbit, especially if Mibbit causes a disproportionately sized administrative headache.
XPath is far too concise. It needs an XML encoding. Something like PMML, where math looks like

<DefineFunction name="frob" optype="continuous">
<ParameterField name="x" optype="continuous"/>
<Apply function="+">
<FieldRef field="x"/>
<Constant>42</Constant>
</Apply>
</DefineFunction>

I wish I were joking.
Not sure, for example with JavaScript it seems one could create some useful Greasemonkey Scripts with very few lines of code. But then I am not a beginner in web technologies, so maybe for a complete beginner it looks completely different.

The LED stuff definitely sounds interesting!
"If you actually spent a lifetime reading those books I don't think you'd really get any closer to understanding the core of the human experience."

True. But I might understand Nature herself. I would like to have a solid grasp of the basics of Physics, Chemistry and Math before I get to 40.

Human experience is better understood through literature and art. It's not "deep knowledge" because it's too personal (as opposed to universal), but that does not mean it does not lead to deep thinking.
What would happen if the quarter was rotated on its disk at relativistic speeds?
Why does your bootstrap startup have a creative director? What does this person do?
Incidentally, having personally written the software behind an irc network that's bigger than freenode

From what I've read in your comments in the past, I'm assuming you used Twisted for the IRC backend. I was wondering, if you were starting this project today, would you still use Twisted? (apologies for veering off topic)
Why should freenode, a not-for-profit independent entity, be required to extend trust to a third party service and their reporting of user identity?
I don't think the k-12 curriculum as it stands is optimized at all. Taking social aspects into consideration, I think at least two years could be shaved (so that students would graduate at 15 or 16).
Avoiding SQL injections is so easy that I don't understand why this topic still lives on.
Are you claiming mIRC made it difficult to use a proxy?

There has always been proxy settings available. I...know some people...that wrote scripts for mIRC that loaded thousands of bots on proxies. That was on an early Pentium with dialup too.
My reading list is biased towards the "why". Funny that I left out the "how" and only noticed it now. I have read a bit on carpentry, but like I said before arts & crafts can be learned from someone who knows more, in a sort of master and apprentice relationship. This is fun because learning carpentry can then be a social experience as well. It provides a good balance to, say, Math or Theoretical Physics, which require endless hours of reading and solitude.
I agree regarding the rate. If you have professional experience there is no reason to start off at so low just because you are new to consulting. The voucher or one time discount is also a good idea. I have found it very difficult to increase rates on customers over the years. It is important to make clear that if you do discount that it is not permanent.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665111
...it would allow Mibbit to readily spoof basic user identity.

What conceivable reason would Mibbit have for doing that?

Mibbit must be trusted to ... not allow proxy connections

No, that's not true. Mibbit must be trusted merely to pass-on the correct IP. Then Freenode's existing proxy detection can handle the job of rejecting proxied connections.

You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here, and suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses. Why?
The Many Differences Between the Successful and Unsuccessful
"By the end of the year, employees will be able to go on a Web site, punch in a zip code, and get a list of providers and costs."

Christ onna bike, finally someone arm-twisted an insurer to release price information. Now was that so hard?
I don't agree. He certainly offers Zune Pass as an example, but his phrase is: "ultimately you can always claim that a song never fully loses its value". Are you suggesting that the meaning of "loses its value" derives from financial properties of the Zune Pass month-to-month plans? He says the claim can always be made. And the claim is that a song never fully loses its value. He can't possibly be basing deep inferences on the state of copyright law on Microsoft Zune Pass, can he?

I don't know, maybe he is. In which case, I agree that the casio analogy wasn't correct.
Hundreds of cities, dozens of departments in every one of them. Fifty state government, hundreds of departments in each. Thousands of semi-independent departments in the federal government.

You have to figure that just statistically, one of them is going to do something stupid in hiring every once in awhile.

Is there are broader point to be made here?
Special Bridal Shower Invitation Cards Printing
Are you claiming mIRC made it difficult to use a web proxy?

Since IRC traffic can't be conveyed via a web proxy, yes. =)

There has always been proxy settings available. I...know some people...that wrote scripts for mIRC that loaded thousands of bots on proxies. That was on an early Pentium with dialup too.

Absolutely, I used to abuse WinGate TCP proxies back in the day. Those eventually disappeared, and it's now much harder to find open TCP-capable (SOCKS, etc) proxies. To seal the deal, major IRC networks perform TCP proxy detection on incoming connections to check for open proxies operating on standard ports.
These tables illustrate how complicated type checking in PHP really is: http://www.php.net/manual/en/types.comparisons.php
Well, I don't really know all the details behind Mibbit's implementation. Interesting that they pass on the IP. But the problem would then be that people can then use any of a number of proxies, etc, to get around that - Mibbit certainly does not have any incentive to block proxies, it's interested only in ad views. So it seems there would be a conflict of interest between Mibbit, interested in maximising users, and freenode, interested in maximising quality. Anyway, obviously freenode couldn't easily get around it, otherwise this news item wouldn't exist, right?

Funnily enough, I'm currently writing my own (toy) IRC server too, though I doubt it will (or could) ever serve the numbers you're talking about! Amazing that it has never really progressed beyond RFC2812, and even that was old news when it was written in 2000. I'd like to see IRC 2.0.
that link runs NSFW ads, look out
I don't see anyone requiring that, but publicly calling into question the integrity of Mibbit without offering any evidence that they cannot be trusted is really bad karma imho.
Ouch. Mibbit+Freenode has saved my butt many times. Sad to see it go... especially when Mibbit is one of the better choices when it comes to free IRC on Windows.
I wonder why they did this just on Facebook. Why not get access to real email logs, look in the Received: headers and do geo-location on the IP addresses. I'm sure if you looked in my email you'd see all sorts of messages coming from all over the world.
> Joel talks about this on the Stackoverflow podcast when they discuss using a lawyer to review the FogCreek office rental agreement.

This is not a rental contract, that the ability of 100 (?) employees to their job rests on. If Joel gets to the Fog Creek office one morning and finds the locks changed, he looses thousands of dollars a day - and not just his own money, that's money that he already owes in wages and so on. Absolutely, get a lawyer.

These two guys are doing some contracting on the side. There are no investments and no liabilities. Their worst case scenario is walking away, not talking to each other, maybe disputing a few $1000. Doing ten rounds with a lawyer (there's really no boiler contract that can cover every conflict two friends working together might encounter) easily costs that, AND then you'll still have to go to court to enforce the contract.

Spend an afternoon writing down a page of bullet points of the rules that should govern this cooperation.

> You should have a lawyer look at most contracts you sign.

No, you should familiarize yourself with basic contract law and be able to estimate the worst case scenario, and decide if that's a risk you want to take.
Capturing Website Exit Clicks: Experiment #1
That's why I thought maybe one could create the actual e-ink displays by oneself, not play with existing ones. I wouldn't even know how to get started, and probably it is completely infeasible - just trying to start thinking in different directions.

I only recently started with some soldering on kits and it was really fun, so I don't want to complain. I'd just like to find something useful to do with it (for beginning, I just wanted to practice soldering and did not even care much about the resulting gadget).
Projects We Hope Apple Is Building
You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here, and suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses. Why?

Regardless of Mibbit's integrity -- of which I have no opinion, and am not calling into question -- freenode has absolutely no responsibility (contractual, moral, or otherwise) to extend their trust to any third party.

If Mibbit wishes to resolve the issue they can enter into a contract with Freenode to establish trust. Mibbit can provide a financial incentive and contractual guarantees, and in return Freenode can agree to extend Mibbit trust and administrative resources.
City asks applicants for Internet passwords
Mailinator's core-duo server now gets 3 Terabyte a month
A parser-combinator approach to parsing JSON
Could they just print it out and give that to you?
well, a company like palm could find numerous ways to not send you the cd in time (delaying strategies)

Take them to court if it isn't supplied within a reasonable amount of time and notify the FSF and the SFLC: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
It is, and I stand corrected. When I went to check the "Data Plan" feature, I saw the following text - which didn't note the no-tethering. I should have drilled down.

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/packages/pack...

---SNIP----
Feature
Please note: Data plan for iPhone is required for the life of your iPhone service and cannot be removed in the future.
Data Plan for iPhone

$30.00/month

Data Plan for iPhone includes unlimited data in the U.S. Access rich HTML email and desktop-level web browsing, as well as Visual Voicemail to listen to voicemail messages in any order you choose.

Please note: AT&T is Apple's exclusive carrier partner for iPhone in the United States. An eligible data plan for iPhone is required. This data plan covers data usage in the United States and does not cover international data usage and charges. If AT&T determines that you are using an iPhone on your account without an eligible data plan, AT&T reserves the right to add an eligible data plan to your account and bill you the appropriate monthly fee.
---SNIP----
Freenode has absolutely no innate responsibility to extend trust to a third party such as Mibbit. I see no reason to judge them poorly for failing to do so, or how this reflects on Mibbit's integrity.
Not just trolls but the opportunities for abuse are tremendous. Think about how political and religious groups could use this to sway opinions and quiet desent.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rigid_di...

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

Which is the best I could find for the question of shortening a quarter to the size of a dime using relativity.