skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One example. Which actually fits what I said; the free views online did very little to help his career. It was only after signing with a record company that commercial promotion pushed the music into public awareness: a studio-funded website, studio-funded placement into Entourage, and studio-funded placement into the queues of radio stations.

I am surprised that none of you brought up Marie Digby or Katy Perry. But then again, their careers mirrored that of Souljah Boy: free promotion did little to help their sales until the traditional studio machine kicked in.
Sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's not. I find that the language has a lot to do with it.

At some point I was doing some modifications to Rails 2.0 internals (the public APIs to these sorts of things never expose the needed functionality) and I found it pretty much impossible to predict when something would get executed (if at all).

Figuring out how Rails is wired demands serious spelunking. Forget reading. You invariably need to get out the profiler and browse call graphs, and then shotgun-pepper the code with thrown exceptions to see where in the stack they come up - and this is just to figure out how it's put together. (Hint: a template handler in Rails 2.3 gets called 32 stack levels deep, at least two of which are a benchmarker).

I think this has much to do with all the "magical" stuff, so it might be particular to Rails - but I also think that the easy power of the language gives programmers a lot of rope to hang their readers with.

I wonder if an easier, "fun" like Ruby language makes people cavalier about setting up crazy structures, whereas "difficult" languages like C++ make people a bit conservative - the language is complicated enough, so why make it worse with crazy design?
Usually best to proceed such questions in the title with Ask HN:

Edit: The OP changed the title after I submitted this comment
I'm a BBC client-side developer. For the record, I am not nor have I ever been part of the Glow team. However, I would like to point out, expressing my own view and mine alone of course, that most of the self-appointed experts on the inner workings of the BBC posting comments here appear to have entirely missed the point about Glow.

Firstly, whatever anyone outside the Beeb might imagine, the fact is that BBC developers are obliged to adhere to a tough set of browser support standards imposed on us from above. No Javascript library was available which met these standards. Glow came along to solve this long-standing, highly frustrating problem and has finally freed our developers to get some really useful Javascript-enhanced UIs onto BBC websites. This is its primary purpose. Offering it to the public is a nice extra but it was not the main reason for creating Glow.

Secondly, all this talk of how much Glow costs licence fee payers is nonsense. To my knowledge, much of the work on Glow has been implemented by a very small number of dedicated individuals, often fitting this work around other responsibilities. Glow has already saved many developer hours across the BBC by eliminating duplication of work across a number of teams and by making it a lot quicker and easier to get quality-assured JS enhancements onto our sites. Far from wasting licence fee money, over time, Glow will mean a substantial saving.

Thirdly, I don't really know Jake, but I kind of met him once at a meeting about Glow in its very early days. He struck me as a pretty humble, unassuming person rather than the deranged ego-tripper some of the rants on this page suggest.

Finally, FAO Mr Resig: Without doubt you are a true coding hero to many of my colleagues. However, if you didn't talk to Jake before now, I think you must have been mistaken in believing you had spoken to the Glow team.

Steven
I little cheesy for my taste (maybe I've been out of the UK too long...) but a welcome alternative to the financial woo that's been so popular on the Internet lately (particularly that Zeitgeist drivel).
Also used in advertising - CPM, Cost Per Mille, ie. cost per thousand views.
Centers for high tech.
I see no excuse for dropping an affiliate link on a submission to HackerNews. It applies not just to the kindle, but anything one would buy after follwoing the link to Amazon, and even at a later time when purchase is not even related to this article. I visit comments first, before link, but I'm sure many others would be impacted. Affiliate links should be discouraged altogether on a site like this, and worthy of banning/suspension.
Where do you get your Saguaro cacti!? You know about everyone running out into the desert, poaching them, and pretty much leaving the desert lifeless? Everyone wants them for their McMansion's in San Diego, and especially the central coast.

On a side note, do you have any Lophophora Williamsii for sale?
Probably it'll last to about the end of Obama's second term.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/100_year_...
I suspect this kind of thing is a lot harder than it sounds.

There are a few things you could catch, like CSS features that just don't exist in IE6, but trying to predict if your particular mix of content+HTML+CSS is going to "look wrong" when viewed in IE is not a trivial problem.
HashMask - Another (More Secure) Experiment in Password Masking
The Invention of C++
Oh, and on your call to action, I like the site!

Is there a legend in regard to those icons in the items pictures? Like, the icons of the roots, are there different variations if they were taproots vs runners? You may want to make mouse-overs on each profile picture of the item.
TokBox Fires 50% Of Engineering Team, All Founders Gone
Sure, it's cool and all but a moving head and blinking lights don't really make it a robot. I mean if you like Gundam sure but this is probaly much more interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpO57NltoAI
I thought it would be added by the system.
But the proposals fail to address the root cause of the industry’s problems, which is that most venture capitalists have failed to find enough decent companies to deliver the returns they promised investors.

Does this imply that creativity and entrepreneurship are a limited resource like oil? Is it a seasonal thing, like corn?

Perhaps the oversupply of funding is unintentionally leading to misdirected investment in too many "me too" companies, and that's robbing talent from what could be world changing startups.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to creating the next great URL shortner.
Weight gain is primarily induced by over-eating. That's fact.

- Most post-menopausal women are not obese. Indeed, most do not gain much weight post-menopause.
- Drugs, by and large, do not result in weight gain. A few drugs do, but only a few.
- Cancer weight loss is a product of the body not being able to digest enough food for the body to use for maintenance, usually because nausea induces vomiting before the food is fully digested.
- As for the sugar: the problem boils down to (again) overeating caused by the taste of sugar stimulating a desire to eat more (sugary) food. In the end, overeating is still the problem.
- Finally, as for human growth hormore: the effects of premature puberty have been documented in cultures where growth hormone is not present in the cows such as in India and China (among the portions of the population wealthy enough to over-eat). Thus, it is clear that growth hormone has a negligible, or at best minor, effect on obesity.
California v Texas: America's future
Layar Opens Up Its Mobile Augmented Reality Platform « Layar
Yeah, I was wondering the exact same thing about copyright. Given the current state of copyright law, it seems like it might be of dubious legality to take a carefully engineered and manufactured part and duplicate it at the press of a button. In much the same way as the advent of digital distribution of music (and video, books, etc.) made the music industry crack down on file sharing, are we going to see producers of engineered products attempt to shut down technology such as this when it becomes more widely available and cheap?
This isn't just for Creative Commons, it also searched GNU FDL-licensed pics. You can search by ability for reuse, commercial reuse, and modification.
It's just been a case of prioritising, really. Running several websites from student societies' to independent stuff (looking back, why on earth didn't I monetise any of it?) meant people knew I did websites, which led to being paid for doing one-off stuff. I then spent summers and holidays doing more complex jobs, including rentacoder type work. Worked for local startups and big corporations in summer vacations (sometimes freelancing in my spare time). Broke free of academia, did a bit more freelancing, then realised I had the freedom at last (no academic terms round the corner) to start up rather than do odd jobs for the rest of my life. You'll know when the time is right for that. Good luck! :)
And for the printing side: http://www.makerbot.com/

They sell kits to make your own, for under $1000. I saw one in action at a tech showcase, it was pretty awesome.
It's like giving a skydiver a winged suit, so that if his chute fails he can at least glide sideways and down instead of falling straight down, perhaps he can make it to water.

I agree with the shovel metaphor when it comes to the attempts to raise house prices and prop up the financial sector.

It's too bad that was such a big part of the stimulus and other investment like infrastructure was such a small one.
They charge for tethering now?

It's been a few years since I've had them as my provider, but I was able to tether previously at no additional cost to the $30 data plan I already had.

With AT&T, it's a $30 data charge PLUS $55 for tethering "privileges".
Hmm. Getting sidetracked, but how is it disingenuous to use your affiliate link when someone asks you where to buy a Kindle? They're only available on Amazon, and it doesn't raise the price at all if they buy through an affiliate link.

In my opinion, lines are crossed when you suggest a less than optimal solution/link because it'll earn you more money. For example - on my NIN site, when an album becomes available for pre-sale, I list each vendor that we find along with their price, even if they're selling it cheaper than Amazon. If I were to ONLY suggest Amazon for pre-orders when I knew better deals were to be had, that's where I feel one starts losing ethics points.

I think the bottom line, for a site like HN, or a message board, or anything like that -- it's up to the owner/administrator of the site. I don't know how much work goes into the administration of HN, but the content is almost entirely crowdsourced. Were it my site, I'd probably strip (but not replace) all affiliate code from links, but I don't really think it's unethical to have posted that to HN with a link. Were it me, I'd have commented in the interest of full disclosure.

And that's pretty much all I was doing with my first post - disclosing something that may be of interest to readers here :)
Introducing the Baen Free Library: Software Piracy and Books [2000]
I'd like to see this also, but I am in Indiana, on dial-up (specifically Brown Co).

Our monopoly providers refuse to offer service in opposition what they have promised Congress.
I was beginning to get perturbed by the inundation of password fields lately, but I actually really like this one. However, I think that it would be more effective as a browser plug-in than a site feature.
What's most sad is how general the problem is-- the ChromeOS clusterfuck being only the most recent (and obvious) example. It seems that the majority of blogs are written by self-appointed pundits feeling they have to comment on every minor bump in the news cycle, instead of actually finding something interesting to say, sometimes even about subjects that others are not writing about.

(I apologize if that came across a little too "You kids, get off of my lawn!", and it goes without saying that the collective filter at HN is a lot better than other places...)
The Firefox 3.5 fiasco
> Jekyll & Hyde personalities where you turn into someone completely different when you get drunk

I know someone who fits this bill 100%, after he downs 3 drinks its like talking to a new person (usually not in a positive way).

Is this a common phenomenon?
I agree, but a more proactive solution is to find and submit some good non-Chrome content. ;)
I found Weatherford's "History of Money" to be a much better history of the subject.
Mapping the Neanderthal Genome
Hollywood: The downturn forces changes on a reputedly recession-proof business
(spoiler warning)

This is the old joke interview with Stroustrup where he admits C++ was only invented as a plot to increase programmer salaries by making programming more difficult than it had to be.

It should be pointed out that Stroustrup never gave this interview, and that it is a parody.
yeah, Kindle's not a good example -- I was lazy to use that.

I just wanted to comment mainly because I always see people going way out of their way to disclose affiliate links (and conversely -- people pouncing on undisclosed ones like they've found a witch) and I always think "do people really get so offended by them?". But yeah, I totally agree that it's wrong to recommend a sub-optimal product b/c you're an affiliate.
Blackberry Storm 9500 Smartphone Unlocked
Blackberry Storm 9500 offers a number of great features like 3G HSPA network, high-quality voice, 3.2 megapixel camera. Using a very advanced touch technology that treats the screen as a keyboard. Imagine the most advanced touch screen phone ever to be released.
I agree. Different implementations will undoubtably use a different visualization technique making it hard to recognize at all the different sites. Though in theory this is a non issue because everyone uses a different password per site, right?
Parts 1-4 are in one volume, and then part 5 (graph algorithms) is big enough that it gets its own volume. I own the parts 1-4 book, and it's very pleasant and readable. The pictures of the algorithms in action really help make the concepts clearer. (They're also a cool hack; the author wrote implementations of the algorithms with a bunch of printf calls to spit out PostScript code, which used a high-level graphics API that he wrote, in PostScript, for the purpose of making diagrams of running algorithms.)
Permanize.org: A short url archive
Or, it's because it's easier to think about one entry box than two. I don't think I'm stupid, but I tend to use the google search box almost exclusively - half the time I'm doing a search, and that's what I want; the other half of the time I'm going to a top-level domain, and I get there almost as quickly via Google.

Why would I want to waste brain time deciding which box to type in if Google will do the right thing either way?

(and about 1% of the time I'm constructing a URL to a test server on localhost. Then I use the address bar - for some reason, google seems to give much poorer results for localhost URLs.)
Unfortunately, it is much more tempting and easier looking to jump on a trend in the hopes of becoming rich and famous than to put your head down and execute non-stop for years, especially without any hope in sight.

PS. How do you get to be on these BusinessWeek and Inc. Awesome Person of the Year lists anyway? Do you go hound them or is it just a side-effect of all the publicity your startup is getting?
You forgot Eight. That would have been my choice.
No, this is retarded; the "unique nonreversable visualization" is trivially attacked offline by brute forcing with a dictionary of passwords. It's just the SHA1 of your password; fundamentally no different from tacking /etc/shadow to your password field as you type.

It wouldn't be retarded if it wasn't expending a lot of effort (and confusing the hell out of users) to get to that bad destination. But that's what it does.

When you consider "solutions" to this "problem", model it against an adversary with a camera.

The author of this post means well, but just masking the password characters, like every secure system has done for the past couple decades, remains the right answer.
Yea, there's actually a pretty wide array of scanners. The Konica is like $80k with high speed and quality. The 3D3Solutions.com machine is low quality but fast and pretty cheap ~$5k. The 3Rivers3D.com machine is $15k but can scan fast at very good quality. The NEXT engine is good for scanning a few things at okay quality, but there are less hyped machines that have really impressive results for high value.
Firefox Jetpack For Real Time Squarespace Traffic Monitoring
Accidental Billionaires: Facebook Movie Review (Leaked Script)
This isn't about anarchy; it's about competition. The thing to keep in mind about governments is that people tolerate their abuses because they provide certain services (protection, property and contract enforcement, etc).

The fundamental idea of Seasteading is that land creates bad governments because the cost of changing providers is prohibitively high. So you end up with a monopoly provider over a certain area that generally becomes wildly inefficient and corrupt (in the sense of institutionally violating the rights of individuals).

No one in the libertarian movement denies the need for someone or some group to provide the services of personal and property right protection, "rule of law," contract enforcement, and whatnot, but if you use the same creativity the people here would apply to any other industry, you clearly see that there must be a better way than what we have now.

That's all anyone is looking for.
34M on food stamps, 15M unemployed, 3M in jail, 51M on SS, 12M on SSD
I could flag this, but it's far better to get a metric for how lame HN is by watching how high it's voted before someone else flags it off.
7 Fabulous Tips & Tricks Daily Sources for Designers & Coders
It's a reasonable question and I haven't downmodded you. I think you're right that whenever the solutions become available they will be expensive. However, I also think these solutions are so sought after that they will likely be quickly copied, not necessarily legitimately, and widespread access will be possible/inevitable.
Of course, sometimes "what it takes" involves a degree of ruthlessness which allows you to put not only your finances, but you marriage and your guardianship of your children at stake. Different individuals have different scales on which they decide whether that kind of ruthlessness is worth the reward, even if they did have the capacity for it.
How often do you type your password next to an adversary with a camera?
Or have an Apple label...
I've thought of becoming a member of the Korea Friends association so I could post there and slowly build up a trusted account to start subtly questioning things, but that don't want to get myself on a list of supporters of known terrorist states.
You could probably match some patterns, but things can get really complicated when you introduce javascript into the mix. All of a sudden your tool needs to test every button on a page to make sure your ajaxed data tables won't blow up your layout.

Also, web development tends to push the envelope often. I've built literally hundreds of web sites / apps and I still come across nasty unexplicable post-ajax redraw bugs in IE6 that I've never seen before (using markup that I used to consider "safe", but which turns out to break under a new novel condition).
This is nothing; I have a screenshot where every link on the front page was about Steve Jobs.

A bigger problem IMO is that, in the current Web, "commenting on every minor bump in the news cycle" works. It generates money and reputation. Can this be fixed? Can sites like HN be part of that solution?
I did it about 50 times today. I'm a building full of cameras. Tell me, how often do you sweep the surrounding area for cameras before you log in somewhere? Thought so. How many times have you ever logged into something from an airport? Ever hear about the Microsoft Blue Hat talks about the pen testers who collect credentials at Sea-Tac?

People just like memes. They're fun to talk about. I promise you there are 1,000 better problems for you to tackle in your app than the suboptimality of password masking. This guy managed not only to waste time, but also to promote an actively evil security extension.
Would you pay five bucks a month for the New York Times?
Metal can already be printed: http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/05/metal-3d-printing.html

But you're not thinking fun enough. Try stem cells: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80DhBLEhdzk
I think I still have the c++ preprocessor (c++ to c converter) here somewhere that I first used to learn c++...

Time certainly flies when you're having fun.

Now lets hope nobody takes this 'interview' seriously.
The tone doesn't "sound" very official, but isn't this the official AT&T Facebook page?
Why Wolfram Alpha fails
'As an aside, I don't think I agree with the sentiment of "because it's hard we shouldn't even try".'

I prefer to phrase it as "If thousands of smart people before you have tried something, you need to know why they failed and have some reasonable reason to believe that your approach is better, or you will just be wasting your time."

I use this most often in the context of someone popping up and declaring that they wish to create a "totally visual" language. I don't want to stop that one-in-a-million guy who might make it work, but just blithely letting someone waste their time isn't very nice either. (That's where the whole "encouragement at all costs" ideology falls down; encouragement is not free and the costs are paid by the encouragee, not the encourager; think before you encourage somebody.) Usually I just see someone spout the same ideas that have been tried tens or hundreds of times before; the excited person should take the time to examine those efforts before continuing on, because the easy stuff has been tried and quite a bit of the hard stuff has been too. This goes for many things.
How I got here in the end: One Hacker's story
I used Procmon to monitor Firefox at startup and it indeed traverses my entire temp folder and Internet Explorer's cache folder.
Although the interminable feeling the author had while waiting for Firefox 3.5 to start up mirrored my own feeling of waiting for him to get to the f'ing point, he's absolutely right: Firefox should just be using the system's secure random number generator on each platform. If you have a vulnerability in /dev/random or CryptGenRandom(), you have a massively more important finding than Firefox crypto.
The goal regardless is to not provide a visual clue to an eavesdropper which they could use discover your password.

I actually don't think the idea of this is all that terrible, just that the implementation isn't right. For example, I can't think of a reason why the representation needs to be unique -- the user would only need a clue if their password is the wrong length or if they likely have a typo. Also, the specific representation used is too resource-intensive; three colored boxes would work just as well.

Still, even if the system returned hundreds of possible passwords for a given hash, and even if it wasn't resource-intensive, it's still providing clues to a third party, which you don't generally want to do. You're still dramatically decreasing their search space.

EDIT: On second thought, there might be a way to make this a little less horrible. If you assume that the user will generally be very close to correct in typing their password, then you could tune a function that would produce dramatically different results for similar passwords, and similar results for dramatically different passwords -- a kind of inverted hash function. Such a function probably already exists, I'm just not familiar with it. If you did that, and completely obscured what the user was typing, so that an eavesdropper couldn't tell the length of the password, then you might be increasing the search space compared to simply displaying asterisks.
Ive also been eying Microsoft's ergonomic keyboard,

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productde...

Assuming you can rebind the back/forward thumb buttons to ctrl/alt, I think it would be a great emacs keyboard.