skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about collisions? Even if the hashing algorithm is the same everywhere, two different urls can yield the very same hash, and the birthday effect (that is, there's a very large chance that two students share the same birthday in a class of 30) makes that an important problem. URL shorteners need to have some sort of mechanism to deal with hash collisions, but this means that it can only be assumed that two identical hashes point to the same url if we know that the very same database is backing both.

Sure, you can increase the length of the hash to a level where the birthday effect isn't very significant but that would mean longer hashes. For hashes only five-six characters long, the chances of collisions are just too high.
XVal - Framework for ASP.NET MVC produces JS validation from server-side rules
This kind of data has a different kind of selection bias.

When you're looking at user actions, you can't discern two different kinds of behavior: (1) The user is doing what he wants to do; versus (2) the user is doing something because he can't figure out the alternative, or that alternative is inconvenient/unwieldy.

So to a certain extent, the results of such studies can server to entrench bad design decisions, rather than improve the system. The developers always have to look for every possible alternative explanation for a user's behavior.
The new "x people like this" widget is really irritating. One of the nice things about Google Reader (and most Google apps) is the subdued interface. So why add these random screamers that give me absolutely no useful information? I really couldn't care less how many people liked this article. If they really must give me this information, keep it consistent with the rest of the UI, not popping out in an eye-catching colour.
Best Places To Begin A Career
Under this proposal, the applications pay a small fee, so the total operation is neutral.
"Godin didn't mean "programmers", he did mean "corporate drones"."

Well, I think you're giving him too much credit, I took his words at face value and I think that he meant exactly what he said.

If you're right, though, what exactly is his point? That you should draw your graphs by hand? Use an unpopular spreadsheet? That you should change the font etc. from the default, which is a deliberately safe choice? What makes him think that a 'marketer' can produce a more appealing graph than a 'corporate drone' graphic designer?
Housing Starts in U.S. Climb to Seven-Month High
Microsoft Bets On Two-dimensional Bar Codes
IPhone App Developer Was Losing Out On $2000 A Month Because Of Sloppy Coding
Based on my experience, I do not agree with the author.

DB Abstraction layer has helped me reuse the same libraries on different DB engines more than once.

I had one occurance when I needed to install my new webapp in a hurry (for demonstration purposes) and couldn't arrange for a database with the server administrator fast. Well... I just changed "mysql" to "sqlite" in my DB config, fixed a few problems with SQL CREATE statements and it worked.

On a side note I also agree with the "PHP is the best templating languge" idea. I just use a template class for it that has a similar API to Smarty.

So yes, I use abstraction layers in both cases. I guess that is more convenient because I do not work on any one web application for too long and I need to carry my libraries and knowledge painlessly from place to place. If I had only one application to build and support at one location... who knows, maybe I would even write php extensions for it in C.
I'm a little suspicious of the collection method for the data. While you got 6500 results, when I register for most sites I have a couple of "low security" passwords I use (which I rotate ever 6 months or so), so that whenever I come across a site that says my usually username is taken, I've got a good guess that I registered at some point and forgot about it (this has happens about 4-5 times a year).

So, what I would be wondering is if many of the results are the same thing. I certainly wouldn't register for a survey with on of my more secure passwords (or generate a new one for it). I would also be more likely to put in a nonsense password that I won't need to remember, and will immediately forget. One thing that should probably be checked, at least before you can draw any real conclusions, is how well the user can log in.

While it is true that the claim was that unobscured password
fields would make for more secure passwords to be used, the reason was that an unobscured password would be easier to type and remember when logging in. If you remove that logging in feature, its hard to have any real conclusions.
I think this is just ridiculous. I'm not necessarily gung-ho about using database abstraction layers myself, but the author only argues against it on the basis of one of the benefits of using an abstraction layer. On top of that, he then admits that he uses a database abstraction layer himself, albeit a seemingly thin one.
http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/ - A little background on the author for anyone interested. Really good read.
From a comment on the post:

"For those who missed John Katz' essay on why high school is designed to suck the first time around:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/25/1438249 "
I don't fully identify with this dude - I had friends, although I was picked on, and I still talk to a number of people from High School.

That said, I did like this read. Potentially it was the emotional reaction I had on his behalf, but I like to think that it was the realism of his scenario: "I don't think I had it particularly worse than a lot of others" and "here are the things that are entirely my problem that accelerated this treatment". While 'the system' is sometimes to blame, it's also the person. And he understands that. But since he works for Google, it's clear that he got it together in later life, and distancing himself from those who used to drag him down is probably a good choice. School reunions are often just people gloating about how awesome they think they are at life anyways, so why should he put himself in a position to potentially arouse jealousy?
Bad link, get rid of the * at the end.
Sounds like my middle school.

...which had much in common with another government run institution: prison.

* Violent and angry inmates.

* Unionized, apathetic officials.

* A shocking level of brutality.

* An institution run almost solely for the economic benefit of the employees.

I won't say that government never taught me anything, though.

It did teach me how to kick the ass of someone who started a fight.
I can't help but cringe everytime I see screenshots of Google Wave.
This guy totally missed the social bandwagon. Thinks that his kid is 'less of a loser' when he knows karate and 'totally kicks the crap out' of people who bully him. Dreaming the 'I will kick your ass' dream isolated from real friends. I wouldn't call that geekery but just a social loss.
Apparently his social skills still haven't improved much. What a whiny nerd.
You only have to open a newspaper to the job page (formerly known as the job pages!) to see where some of the issues lie.

I don't know what it's like in the US, but here it's very common to see job advertisements padded out with unnecessary and heavily loaded language like "we need a bubbly, bright and outgoing administrative assistant". I looked at a person spec the other day for a local council admin job which had "good sense of humour" in the desirable column. For that sort of job, personality type shouldn't come anywhere near the decision-making process - and whoever wrote that person spec should be called to account.

It's not outright discrimination, but it does come close - and the experience of the bloke in the article is something I can identify with. You send in a good CV, stellar references and an eloquent, articulate covering letter, get called in to interview... and come second because you're ever so slightly awkward and tend to prefer to concentrate on working rather than making small talk about Britain's Got Talent. Perhaps it's partly why so many hacker types end up gravitating towards the startup world rather than a job in some big company...
"Got it together" ?

What the !@#$%^ ?

He was a smart productive kid, and he got picked on by imbeciles.

Now he's a smart productive adult.

He hasn't gotten shit together - he had it together.

The difference is that now he's in a free market, with other competent adults, instead of in a government-run Lord of the Flies style child warehousing make-work program.

To say that he "got it together" is to blame the victim.
Future military robot to feed on corpses
Yeah. Folks who are punched, have their fingers broken, and are mocked in the hallways shouldn't harbor resentments.
> Thinks that his kid is 'less of a loser' when he knows karate

What he said was that the kid was going to be able to physically defend himself from assault.

Can you disagree with that assertion?
I really like cute animal pictures.... it's a shame I have to post those elsewhere. :)
Part of growing up is understanding that people develop - People can change.
Especially since it's global across Google Reader. I couldn't care less that some random person in Florida that uses reader liked an article that ended up in my rss feed. I wish I could turn it off.
I don't think technology is the answer to a better educated public. Isn't it a simple marketing problem? When Nike wants you to buy a $150 pair of shoes, they get you to think: "all the cool people have them" or "to be cool, you need these shoes." Once there is peer pressure to understand grammar, write well, and know calculus, we will have a better educated populace.
He starts saying DB abstraction layers are useless and he seem to conclude saying every abstraction and every library not written by you is pointless

this seem to me like "I'm paranoid about unknown code but I can't accept the truth SO I reinvent the wheel over and over again putting my code in my library and I say everyone this is cool cause it's faster and performance and bla bla blah"

the truth:
abstraction -> helps think about the logic that matters in your program
library -> helps not to reinvent the wheel and use code tested by everyone

his logic:
abstraction -> ZOMG unknown stuff HEEELP, let's think about every algorithm in my program from scratch and let's justify this to me by saying I'm saving 3-4 intermediate function calls
I all against those social features introduced in GR.

In my opnion they should focus on core functionalities missing (such as feed filters), their social features are way beyond what you can find elsewhere to share content (Friendfeed, Facebook...).

The "like" feature is plain terrible, the smiley face is distracting me from the content of the feed because it's on top and bright yellow. It was an awful idea to put it there.
I am a supporter of avoiding assault.
When I noticed it I found the number to be the most annoying thing about it. It shows a stark contrast between what is popular and what isn't, and I don't care for that at all. I read feeds because I have found the authors to have consistently high quality content, not because its popular. When I want that, I go hit up a social news site.

At the very least, they should be limiting it to only people on your contact lists. I couldn't care less how many random Google users liked the same thing I did. If, on the other hand, I could see that people I know liked it, maybe I would want to discuss it with them.
Ouch. Reading about such traumatic experiences makes me wonder if this is more common in US schools (especially public schools; don't know if the author was at one). Growing up geeky in India didn't have any such downsides, but that might have been peculiar to the small school went to,but I don't think it fully explains it. Developing nations with a favorable regard for the sciences and engineering seem to inculcate a favorable outlook towards geekiness. How is it for people who grew up elsewhere?

The early and constant negative emotional feedback definitely shape one's view of people and nature, skewing it because of sampling (Most kids do grow up into reasonable adults, eventually, one hopes).

I also wonder if the massive popularity of organized school sports is a factor. Providing developing adolescents with a single hierarchy to place everyone on seems misguided. The world is more multi-faceted with a place for everyone, but that sort of a thing may be hard to impart in the limited aquarium that is school.
It takes (usually) four to six oncogene activations to take a cell (or its progeny) into serious, lifethreatening, mofo cancer mode. Things need to be turned off - programmed cell death (apoptosis), DNA repair, sensitivity to growth-suppressing signals from neighbours, etc - and turned on - ability to 'eat' through neighbouring tissues so it can metastasize via your bloodstream, ability to send out vascularisation signals so that the growing tumour can co-opt the body to send some capillaries and minor veins its way before it starves and chokes from being too big - and so on.

Apoptosis (suicide) of a cell before it gets more/all of these (assuming they're irreperable, which is the first resort, of course) is a fantastic safety mechanism. Override it at your peril.
Maybe forbes to stick to making crappy slideshows...
It really makes one wonder why an alternative to the App Store hasn't sprung up yet, and I don't mean Cydia.

It will of course be popular among the geeks first, but hey, how else have most of the web applications started out?

Bring on the democracy!
If it's available as a per file option it balances the usefulness. For documents that need high security you can choose it. Mobile devices should still be able to connect in through a VPN right?
Facebook uses your photos in their ads
Set Based Filesystem idea
cancer rates would still be astronomic for anyone exposed to the fallout. worse, perhaps.
It's probably a megadosage of vitamin E or a related compound. Studies from Nagasaki and Hiroshima showed that survival was highly correlated with vitamin E levels.

If you take large amounts (>2000 IU or more) of vitamin E your skin won't sunburn as badly and possibly not at all depending on how much you take. The more vitamin E, the less the sunburn. There's no practical maximum dosage.

Instead your skin will feel warm but won't hurt. It won't turn so red and in particular it won't blister and peel. You _will_ tan. Rather than die off quickly with massive inflammation, the skin loses cells slowly so that in about a week there will be a slight graininess to the skin.

It does help, although not as much, to take large doses of vitamin E _after_ a sunburn. I'd recommend at least 10,000 IU for an adult sunburn.

Here's a link (low dose = 400 IU):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11873518?dopt=Abstract

Quotes from the linked article:
"vitamin E at a dose of 400 IU/kg acts as a good radioprotectant against lethal doses of cobalt-60 radiation."

"Vitamin E was more efficacious when given subcutaneously than when given orally." Which is why I recommend very high oral dosages.
Newspapers are in the business of publishing secrets. They do not get sued out of business. Ask a professor.
How much copied code constitutes theft these days? Arguably, a system may hinge on one to ten crucial calculations or routines, despite the many, many lines of code to make sense of that data and then present it to the user. Does copying those crucial algorithms constitute theft while copying the same quantity of procedural fluff not? I suspect there are some very grey lines in the precedential cases leading up to now. Does anybody know definitively?
Medieval thinking is applied to a wired world
Interesting hackers have interesting screensavers.

I must not be that interesting then
Fertility treatment breakthrough: Sperm from stem cells put men on notice
That's an interesting idea. Imagine a wikipedia-like site that aimed to be the definitive guide to known flamewars. I'm just trying to comprehend the carnage that such a system would cause between the people who cared about the site for what it represented vs the people who just cared about their varying legs of the debate.

feuerkrieg.com is available.
Setting aside the whole issue of geek abuse, and Mark's story in particular, for a moment:

I have to say that I find the whole Facebook experience very creepy in general. Anyone who can't figure out how to get in touch with me outside of Facebook is definitely not a "friend", so what's the point of pretending that they are?
Weak, weak sauce. How can you have time to post on hacker news but you can't get a server back up to allow withdrawls?
I can't disagree with his sentiment. Having been bullied myself and being part of a small racial minority, at least I ultimately had the good fortune of attending a public highschool in Canada that was flooded with geeks (relatively small town with the school next to two universities).

That said, I think experiences - both good and bad make us who we are. In a sort of sadistic way, I'm sort of glad that the bullying built up a certain level of resilience and has helped motivate me. I haven't delved much into the author's personal life but I can't help but imagine that while he may not want to friend these jerks on facebook, in some small part he owes some of the best parts of who he is to these people.
So essentially people have a false sense of security when their password is obscured. They are equating an obscured password box on screen with whether it is a secure login.
China’s Internet Population Hits 338 Million
He didn't have it together, he didn't know how to manage social contact. He readily admits being awkward and unable to communicate. Being smart is not exclusive to having it together. It doesn't excuse what happened to him, but there are plenty of adults that get walked all over too.
It is really much more pleasant to use an iphone app rather than an in browser app. Not only is the appearance far better, but, I don't have to wait for a button to load. It's there already and I can push and wait rather than, wait, push, wait.
So am I. But this quote from the post is pretty self-explanatory:

"One of the mantras that his karate school follows is: Never start a fight, but if a fight starts, always be the one to finish it. And that's what he'll be able to do."
I went to my 10-yr high school reunion. I had conversations with former jocks, geeks (the smartest guy IQ of 164 was now working for the government), some of the prettiest girls, others. Talked about their life now. It didn't really matter what we were in high school. The biggest surprise was a geeky girl I had known was now beautiful and helping produce records. Some of the jocks were very successful salesmen. Other than that, it was oddly reassuring to revisit old paths once tread. It was nice to talk to people at the reunion who I pretty much never talked to in high school.

It's not like we all became friends and traded numbers. In fact, we sarcastically said 'See you at the next one'.

We all grow up and change. And sometimes we don't but high school as someone wiser than me once said - high school is a geographic coincidence. Not because you want to be there.
I love the way it looks, nice clean layout very easy on the eye IMO, but I guess its very subjective.
I have yet to see taekwondo or karate training that isn't a total joke. Maybe good schools exists somewhere in the US, but anyone at these schools from the yellow pages is just going to get their ass kicked by the first guy who is stronger.
Gets a rise out of one, but not particularly interesting. I do wonder where this school is so that I can avoid the area (although it may well have changed in the meantime).
You're probably right, but it's literally true that Apple created WebKit -- even if WebKit is mostly code they didn't write.

Very few open source projects are created in a vacuum.
I would say that that's the vibe I get from Twitter on occasion.
Financial Times editor says most news websites will charge within a year
This is quite a neat solution, but it has a few detracting points, most notably mass updates when you want to modify the tree.

It also seems slightly irrelevant; surely it's better just to read the structure into memory when the application starts and just work on the data structure in memory?
Artistic tendencies linked to 'schizophrenia gene'
Do you have any idea how many man-hours go into the preparation of WWDC talks? Sure, other people may give away their development presentations. But then, they're not (IMHO, etc, etc) nearly as informative, polished, or well produced as standard WWDC fare.

Like seemingly everything related to Apple, if you don't perceive -- or just aren't interested in paying for -- the difference in quality, don't buy it. But also please at least consider not insulting the intelligence of those who do and are by claiming the cost isn't justifiable.
Yeah, I couldn't understand that either.

He goes on saying "database abstraction layers" are bad but then, at the end says he uses a "library" that abstracts away database issues such as persistent connections, replication awareness and load balancing. How is that not a database abstraction layer?
Our users didn't install Firefox in the first place. We did. And we have to update it. It's damn annoying.
Democracy? At Apple? Haven't you been paying attention for the last 30 yrs?
I like the sharing items stuff (as long as your friends don't share like, a dozen items every day) and starring something for later is just an extension of the GMail capacity.

I could do without the "cool" button though.
While most of the points may be valid.

"Almost no app updates were approved during the entire month of June with no explanation."

This is because they were launching 3.0 and all apps needed to be capable of running on OS 3.0.
Apple don't allow that.

You aren't allowed to make an app that allows other apps to be installed. The App Store is the one and only way to install apps, forever.
I had my fingers broken in high school too, because someone wanted to see what would happen if they jumped off the bleachers and landed on my hand while I was stretching. The school nurse wouldn't even entertain the possibility that they were broken, so she just sent me back to class even though my fingers were twisted and I was throwing up everywhere. So as a result my fingers are still kind of messed up to this day, because they never got properly set.
Google Wave is a protocol. What you see screenshots of is a web app built with the Google Web Toolkit.
http://www.cookupbooks.com
start early - K-3 reading instruction
Then I don't understand your position. In my experience, learning to fight has been one of the most effective ways of avoiding assault. You just start signaling to people in various subtle unconscious ways that you're able to defend yourself.

It's a pity my parents didn't understand that when I was in school, and gave me the usual idiotic lines like "don't stoop to the bullies' level". I only realized this when it was almost too late to change, went and took some boxing lessons, and whaddaya think - it's improved my "social skills" quite a bit. :-) See, "social skills" are mostly about how others perceive you, and people are pretty damn perceptive when it comes to pecking order.
Should Everyone Go To College?
best line:

"Michael Osinski, a former computer programmer, is an oyster farmer."
I spent much of my childhood avoiding assault (and never had it as bad from other kids, at least, as the blogger), but I think it was a mistake to do so. I think if I'd snapped just once or twice, it would have made others think twice about the nonsense they pulled on me. I was more afraid of the external consequences (police and other authority figures) than worried about getting beat up, though, so I just sat and took it.

In any case, the blogger in question didn't manage to avoid assault. I don't imagine he went to the bullies and said, "Here, break my fingers".
So err, what happens if you are developing apps on behalf of clients, and you want to demo apps to each of them, and you end up with more than 100 clients?