skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is our first meetup. If you like functional programming and booze then you should definitely attend. We will choose a venue after getting a rough estimate of how many people are attending. Thanks.
I've actually been thinking about moving out recently and have been looking at 2 bedroom places, or 1 bedroom + den because I can rent out the other room on AirBNB.

Rent in Yaletown (downtown Vancouver) is outrageous, but renting out the other room a few times/month could be worth it. At least to cover part of the rent and a maid :P
No Mountain High Enough
For my Software Engineering class, we had to make a contribution to an open source project. Firefox is about as "legacy system" as you get without learning COBOL.

I think the better question is why didn't this guy seek out the MULTIPLE opportunities to do "real" development (Open Source, _Good_ internships, etc?

It's not as if we're all (College CS Majors) twiddling our thumbs and being useless all year long.
Looks like a nice decision, however I also feel that Debian's problem is the huge freeze of thousands of packages, making the 'stable' ('stale' is better for some) distribution out of date quickly while adding a large burden to it's developers and maintainers. This blog post by the author of Ion window manager sums it all up better than I could:

http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2007/03/03/T19_15_26/
That's a good point, but if it's the case, Apple was not forthcoming about that. I believe the statement said something about "duplicated functionality."
Wow now I can read Daring Fireball, thanks!
Because the Microsoft Way is to give top priority to holding on to the high-leverage point in a market, and to do the lowest-quality engineering they can get away with to hold onto it. Their internal culture favors mediocre work as long as it's done fast and the testers don't find too many bugs.

Search is now one of the highest-leverage points in the world economy, and it will become more important as time goes on. Microsoft having their claws a little deeper into search means they will use that position not so much to give people everywhere access to information, but mostly to help other Microsoft ventures grab and hold market share against competitors.
I guess I see as positive since I've thought for years that Yahoo could not continue on the path they're on. This seems like a necessary change for the better.
>Instead, the lodgings bid for the itineraries of the travellers.

Ah, I see. That wasn't evident to me. The way it was described seemed to be that travellers were bidding on open rooms and highest bid won.

Your way is interesting, but I'm not sure what benefit it offers me as a traveller. In order to drive the service you'd need to create a market of travellers eager to provide the products to bid on. I'm having a hard time understanding why I would do that on the surface.

Also, I understand why you use the word lodging, I just don't think it fits. I need to know as a consumer exactly how I can benefit from your product. If I'm confronted with a word that I need to define, it delays my understanding of the product and increases the chance that I not use it.

Regardless, good luck to you. I wish you the best of successes.
The attack is based on being able to watch how the badge changes with each keystroke. Changing the number of colors displayed doesn't really help.
Journalism is picking up the phone
The NPR.org Relaunch, As Seen On Twitter
I have mixed feelings about this. It sounds like the author's needs are better suited to a degree in software engineering than computer science. A CS degree is not a degree in programming or software development, even though that's the path many people take.
It's amazing how the majority of black hat hackers listed turned out to be successful bussiness men once they "see the error of their ways"

It appears that they compromised systems because they were bored, or merely wanted to prove it could be done.

Thanks for the article, good read.
Perhaps, but religion is largely something that we came up with through thinking. When you need to control a bunch of slaves, it's nice to be able to say, "your life sucks now, but if you work really hard, there will be PRESENTS waiting for you when you die! YAY!! It's not me, your hated master, saying this; it's God! The creator of the whole Universe loves you if you work yourself to death. So get out there and do it." Very convincing story, and it mostly worked. (Religion plays on a number of human desires; wanting something more, wanting to fit in with everyone else, etc.)

It still works today.
Microsoft was innovative in one way: the cheap, permissive licencing model they adopted for DOS is the reason it became the de facto standard for PCs.
Thank you! We'll need it!
Since you asked, here's my take (I'm certainly not the arbiter of anything on here):

Some edragonu stats:

Member: 26 days
Submissions: 26
Own Blog Submissions: 23

When you attend a party, do you walk in anD start blasting everyone with your conversation? Other people come in, introduce themselves and take time to see how the thing is going and then mingle.

People can interpret your behaviour to be spammy. It looks like you're more interested in publicizing your blog than anything else.

You haven't broken any rules per se, but that's because there aren't a lot of rules. There's nothing necessarily wrong with submitting your own posts, but maybe you can understand why other people are reacting to the rate and quantity.

A conversation goes both ways. So far, it looks like you've been doing all talking and no listening.

As for the quality of your posts: I don't specifically remember anything standing out in the ones I've read. I also notice that I haven't upvoted any of your articles yet.
Each stable version of Debian is maintained for one year after the release of the next. Unless this policy changes, this means that the next releases will be supported for a minimum of three years. If the releases were yearly, as you wish, there would be only two years of security support, which would hurt precisely those users that want long term support and use Debian stable.
Does anyone else find "currying" the cooking process to be a useful mnemonic for "currying" the functional transformation, like you're partially combining the ingredients of the full recipe?
Just to clarify for those who didn't RTFA:
40% of jerks is the best. More than that is counter-productive.

100% of jerks is worse than 100% of non-jerks.
I never thought this deal would go through -- it doesn't make sense either for GGF or TPB. IMO the most likely possibility is that it was all just a stock pump-and-dump scheme by major shareholders of GGF.
It's part of the mythology of American capitalism: if they're a big winner, they must be a big innovator, because innovation drives the economy!

Don't get me wrong, I love American capitalism, and I don't think innovation trumps all other factors (like reliability). The myth of Microsoft innovation is just one of those peculiar cultural myths that, in this case, blocks out the reality for people who don't work in the field.
I made a short film about this stuff a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWHd5cWjKC8

( With more robots and Gene Simmons than the npr link )
I interpreted this to mean alcoholics that are still functioning in society.
It seems, based on your free-form questions, that you're checking to make sure people have a genuine interest in functional programming before letting them into the group. Am I correct? Kind of reminds me of http://freehackersunion.org/
oh please...

http://www.princeton.edu/newmedia/podcast/2002.xml
Cotchett lands interview with Madoff
Which is another thing I'm curious about... How does their agreement with AT&T help the end-user experience?

It seems there are plenty of people who would be happy to use another carrier. And, in other countries, you can apparently buy unlocked phones from Apple. So the agreement with AT&T seems to be more about making money than about making great products...
This is a good point. Microsoft has guts and even some creativity when it comes to marketing.
one of the editors of this posted the important part of this along with links to related studies and the hn page for it is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=718700

the final line of that post got me thinking about how good my work environment is: ideal creative workspace: a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with references to foreign countries.

i don't know about blue walls though :P
There's something dubious about my point: does excessive worry about death result in people having fewer children?

Maybe the evolutionary pressure comes from telling people that God wants them to have children. And so those with biology favorable to belief in God would have more children.
suicide? how?

which is better? giving up the areas in which yahoo can't win, getting a good deal in return and concentrating on the areas they are strong in or trying to fight a losing battle, sinking millions of dollars in the process?

His logic seems to be 'search is very important so yahoo shouldn't give up its second place'. It doesn't matter search is uber important, what matters is whether yahoo can keep its place. They certainly feel they can't, so its very sensible to get out before the going gets really bad.

good business is all about deciding which areas to play, and knowing when to leave
"Not everyone can design the product they want - its quite a rare skill. You get wrapped up in irrelevant features."

This skill is hard to find in a startup because founders have more technical acumen than the market. In other words founders are "power users," and most markets are not.

Also, editing your own work, as in looking at something that you've spent months on, saying, "this sucks," and restarting takes a lot of discipline. For a start-up that is worried about its runway, the stress of doing so can be overwhelming.
Where are you majoring in CS?

What are the names of some of the classes you have taken in your program?
The Top Most? ... of All Time?

They must be really good.
Waiting until the 3rd and 4th year makes even less sense. The sooner that schools can get their students out in the real world, doing real world projects, as the author described, the sooner they'll learn how to develop good code. Schools should be pushing students to get internships after their second, and even after their first year.

I'm in an internship after my second year of school, and I have many times wished I'd had an internship last year as well. Even still, I've learned way more this summer than I did in the first two years of college combined.
Imagine Pot Was Legal. How Would You Brand It?
IPhone development tools that work the way you do
How much arm-swinging do speed / race walkers do? Since they compete over long distances and durations, saving energy would be a competitive advantage.
For more on his eccentricity and genius, I highly recommend "32 short films about Glenn Gould".

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108328/
Some day, I hope people will stop writing their software in C.
Another consideration, however, is how exactly someone would be able to tell what the colors are, at least in common use-cases.

You seem to be bringing this up as an argument that the security concern isn't really that important, that because a snooper wouldn't be able make fine-grained distinctions between colors, the attack is more difficult.

First, that's not true, it just means you have to be a little more robust to fuzziness. In your current 3 bar configuration, the subtle differences between the possible exact values of a given single color bar are usually dwarfed by the not subtle differences between the 3. Further, you get an even bigger shift when the next letter gets typed.

Second, even if we did grant that point, doesn't it simultaneously undermine the very purpose the tool is trying to serve? If it's hard for an attacker to verify the colors, isn't it equally difficult for the user who is supposed to be using this to check that they've typed their password correctly?

It looks cool, I will definitely grant that. But it's just not a good idea, and I really hope I never see it used by any sites I frequent.
I like it, too. The "early 1900s Dane" not mentioned by name is Erlang, btw.
Can you elaborate your "spiritual experiences". I would love to read about them. It's not often that you hear an atheist having an experience like that.
I strongly disagree that universities should be trade schools whose objective is to prepare students for the "industry." Aren't there loftier goals in life?
Stanford’s STEP Teacher Education Program, Social Justice and Dressing in Drag
I'm a CS undergrad, and I'm working building software in the 'real world' for the summer. There's no way they could teach this kind of experience in the classroom or with projects. I like the idea of OSS work as a course requirement, but the only way to learn how to _really_ program is to _really program_.
It's not just marketing though. It's legitimate business genius.

Say what you will about their software - but there is no argument that they know how to run a business.
The old saying attributed to John Maynard Keynes is that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
I hope Oracle will do it better. =)
I think academia is not about business and should never be about business. IMHO If the academia starts to aim industry students will stop doing research, innovating or doing teaching. This will be catastrophic for CS and industry.
Well really the issue is that the field needs to be split.

I too once thought my CS undergrad was worthless because it was all this theory and no practice (at least not practice at inheriting bad code, improving it, and leaving good code to someone else). But really the problem was that I went into CS thinking I was going to get a degree in Software Engineering. They are in fact very different things, and should be different degrees in my opinion.

Just like there is a different degree for Math and Accounting, or Architecture and Architectural Engineering, there is a pretty big gap between CS and Software Engineering. Of course they have things in common, and could share many introductory classes, but separating them would make it more clear up front what you are getting yourself into, and make it more clear at the end what you actually learned.

That said, I'm glad that separation hadn't happened when I was an undergrad. I went into college thinking that I wanted to be a Software Engineer, and was fairly disappointed to 'waste all my time' on this theory stuff. But now, a few years after graduating, I find the theory much more engaging, and am going back to grad school for more of it. If I had had the option of a Software Engineering degree when I started, I might never have discovered the fun that is CS.
May prove true, but Blue Brain likely won't be involved!8-))

But seriously, I tend to agree with jsonscripter: it's always 10 years away.

- still waiting for my flying car.
The study was done in the UK. Conventional produce there may be very close to organic. However in the US this study would likely have very different results.
If you rephrase that as "alcoholics with no side effects," it's pretty much the same thing.
Um... Apple does market research. It does a shit ton of it. It does it now and it's done it a long time ago. Back in the 90's, with children. They would truck us in, 3rd graders in the elementary schools nearby, and take us to meeting rooms and show us gadgets, educational toys but maybe they showed off software too, and asks us how we like them.

Even now there's a lot of teams dedicated to market research.
Supposedly, I don't think there's any official announcement beyond t-mobile's second next week. Would a headphone jack be too much to ask for?
Note: It's actually OK to agree with me 38% of the time (i.e. the actual percentage of time I'm correct).
My father (who did start a company) gave me the sage advice that you don't want to start a company unless that company will be the absolute top priority in your life.
More on the QIP = PSPACE result.
Capsaicin in peppers is one example of a fruit with a powerful toxin (irritant) for one class of animals. Mammals in general can't eat chili peppers without severe irritation of the digestive tract. Birds can eat chili peppers without harm--capsaicin is specific to biochemical properties of mammals. Birds don't have teeth, and don't grind up seeds as they eat fruit. Mammals as a class have very effective grinding teeth, and thus would destroy the seeds as they eat the fruit. The plant's adaptation allows it to have seeds spread by one class of animals while it is avoided by another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin
Got any proof? If not, enjoy your placebos.
This is great! I've been wanting this for years!
Django Version 1.1 Released
The article mention Ctrl+Shift+R to Open a Resource, but Ctrl+Shift+T is just as nice - restricts the search to Types (i.e. classes).
As a general rule, merchant marine vessels sailing under any flag are not armed. The US isn't "special" here.

Naturally, US military vessels, including the Coast Guard, are armed.
That's true, and it's a good point. Still, there's something to be said for an established user-base. Most of the time one product dominates the market, even though there are many other superior products out there.

I've done some reasonably interesting stuff - none of which was for-profit, but also none of which was hugely successful. Turns out marketing is hard!
I'll be smug for a moment and declare that this is one excellent reason for not choosing closed software systems.
Great link to Joel Spolsky's post, thanks Drew. I haven't read his archived stuff (just got into dedicated blog reading late last year).
What about big mirrors on two opposing walls?
Indeed. The specific stuff you get at a code review depends completely on who else is on your team -- stuff that's great at one place is terrible at another. It's stuff you pick up from the specific software industry you join when you get out of school, web, embedded, desktop, whatever.

The stuff you learn in school is useful for any of these, and is the same for all of them. Equally important, you can really tell who's been through those courses or not, independent of how well their code fits the normal maintainability or performance requirements. Higher-level concepts are just lost on them, or, if they've managed to pick some of it up informally, so intermangled with other conceptually-different topics that clear thinking and analysis is nearly impossible.
SPARQL By Example
Don't know, since I am not a UK lawyer - here is a comprehensive discussion of work for hire that includes what appears to be an informed discussion of UK law on this point: http://bit.ly/ysePr (pdf)(concluding that the UK law is very similar to US with the except of certain categories of works). Hope this helps.
Vague? So high cholesterol, hormones, high saturated fat, and heterocyclic amines are essential nutrients and not toxic to our bodies?
The Trouble with the Segway
s/every/any/

You'd have to be able to send a text message to every iPhone in the world in order to hijack all of them.
I agree, but I'm not sure if the field of Software Engineering is ready yet for us to split the degrees. For example, see the ACM's position from 2000 on licensing Software Engineers: http://www.cs.wm.edu/~coppit/csci690-spring2004/papers/selep...
I agree with you, but the reality is that most people go to college 'to get a good job'. So most people expect college to train them for that job, and most employers have come to expect people to hit the ground running.

My grandfather started working as a draftsman for a pipeline company after the Korean War. He had nothing more than a high school diploma, and he said he took the job because "it paid $3 an hour and I liked to draw". He spent the first year being trained in a special facility the company had set up just for that purpose. What company does that nowdays? I'm sure there has to be some, but it's far from the norm.
Free: Two Magical Tables
I'm not sure that the indep claim covers the way podcasts are delivered nowadays. Claim 1 seems to require a single channel which both provides notification of new content and from which new content is downloaded. But, an RSS feed for a podcast just provides a URL pointing to the content. No one really downloads anything from an RSS feed.

My guess is that if this patent reads on any technology in use now, it's probably something more like dvrs or on demand TV.

Caveat: I haven't read the specification, so it's possible that there's a special definition that I'm missing.
I'd suppose I could drink a bottle of pesticide and tell you how I feel, but I would feel rather stupid proving the obvious.
Fantastic analysis. But where's the money? The point of Calcanis' piece is that the Borg only gets (buys?) its way into markets which are big or growing.

Whilst there is no doubt Yahoo is strong in some areas, he's saying Yahoo has thrown-in the towel in the big fat one. He argues that Yahoo had more than one chance of being a player in search and each time they fluffed it. All the current focus-on-core-strengths talk doesn't cover up the fact that they blew the big one. That's his point, and I think it's a very valid one.
Ask HN: Review my startup Weegoh
In short, weegoh is a social messaging utility with geolocalization. It lets users know more about what's going on nearby, where their friends are, what interesting events are happening around them, and to connect with friends while on the go.

On Weegoh users can: Share their current location and find what is going on around them Publish messages, photos, videos or comments to other services Discover new places and people nearby.

On this version we have:
A mobile site: http://m.weegoh.com.
Updates via an IM
Updates via e-mail
Sign in with Twitter/Facebook

We have been in private beta for about 3 months, and we would really appreciate your feedback.

http://weegoh.com

Thanks!
I had 6 internships under my belt by college graduation and they taught me a lot. However, by and large, I learned more about workplaces and teamwork than about difficult programming situations. Internships, in most of my experience, don't encourage really hard programming work.

I got that with my CS degree. The theory classes were 7 out of the 15 classes I took, but the programming classes were just as intense. We did complex image recognition in groups in Java the first year, tons of Scheme and Oz to learn concepts, and then wrote a whole networking stack and basic Linux OS in C. The latter two projects were significantly harder than anything I've done at an internship and required teamwork and a great deal of self-teaching.

It may be that my experience was abnormal (the school had a small but recognized CS dept), but I got the meat of my practical programming skills at school (ignoring independent work for the sake of focused discussion). Internships were certainly useful - but in my reflections I don't think they increased my programming power, if you will, all that much compared to school.
Looking at how Apple behaves in the market, I'd say that it might provide just the market correction that they need.

I'm more interested in not having my iPhone hacked and not having lots of support calls from customers who have had theirs hacked than whether Apple gets whatever comeuppance you/he decides they deserve.

Quite a bit of code is still written in C

C does not equal 'buffer overflows'. Mistakes in C mean buffer overflows.
I think the expectation for any engineer fresh out of school is that they will need some on-the-job training to learn how to be an engineer in practice.