skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If only programmers were expected to swear an oath of refusal to work on user-hostile systems:

"Participants in the DRM debate implicitly hold the view that the ownership of your operating system, your personal information, and your media is a complex, joint relationship between you, your operating system vendor, the authors of the applications you run, and the owners of any media that pass through that application. Prevailing wisdom is that the way any given software behaves should be jointly determined by all these parties, factoring in all their interests, and that the argument is simply a matter of degree: who should be given how much control, and by what mechanism. I don't like to think of myself as an extremist, but on this issue, I can find no other position to take. When I hear lawmakers, commercial software developers, and even other open source programmers, asking questions like, "how much control should we afford to content producers in media playback programs?", I cannot help but think of Charles Babbage:

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

The "you don't own your computer" paradigm is not merely wrong. It is violently, disastrously wrong, and the consequences of this error are likely to be felt for generations to come, unless steps are taken to prevent it."

"Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere"

http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html

I do, however, wonder how many could keep such an oath, esp. under present economic conditions. And most people, I think, will happily build, say, baby-mulchers if simply asked to - even without the threat of starvation. Human beings are sheep.

Ultimately, we, the programmers, are the foot-soldiers of DRM.
I agree it's a pretty hokey site, but is it really that out of character for Microsoft? Think about the gates-seinfeld ads, the laptop hunter ads, and so on.

From the looks of this thing, I am guessing that Microsoft is losing all the best hires to google and startups, and they're hoping to reverse the trend. Seems kind of par for the course, doesn't it?
Yeah, let's just write off another generation.
The Hacker News guidelines are a bit broader than what some participants here remember (or have ever looked up):

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I like the intent but it needs more meat and a little bit more of a wind-up - as a joke, it's all punchline.
Feed me data
The upgrade wasn't sudden, and happened over 2 years ago. It's about time that this...I don't know if I should call it a rumor or what...stop being repeated. Like many, many software projects, Matz realized that his ambitions for Ruby 2.0 were just a little too grandiose, and so he set 1.9 as the "now" upgrade and 2.0 as the future.

Essentially what it breaks down to is that there was a lot of work on making the VM faster (i.e. switching to YARV) and at the same time there was work on some pretty severely back-compat-breaking changes. It became clear that the performance improvements were needed sooner rather than later, and this needed to happen in a way that didn't break backwards compatibility (1.9 really is not that different from 1.8 in the grand scheme of things).

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when this decision (that 1.9 should be a "sooner rather than later" performance release) was made, the alternative implementations were not as viable as they are today. I suspect that if JRuby from today was transported back in time to 2 years ago, Matz might have said "Use JRuby while I work on 2.0"...
I live in Beijing. You would have to pay me to own a car here. The traffic absolutely terrifies me.

I'm aso pretty certain renting (i.e. using a taxi here all the time) is cheaper than owning in this case. And who doesn't like being chauffered around?

All that said, I don't think people buy cars here so much for convenience as for status.
There is a long tradition of 0.5 increases for "less than full rev but more than bug-fix":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Apple_2
I just have to comment here.

There's a journalist style that loves to blame failure on some personal quality rather than on the structure of the system itself. Certainly, when it fell apart, I'm sure if one looked hard enough, one could find a "mistake" that LTCM made other than following an unsustainable system. But the invariant is that escalating leverage and escalating speculation is ultimately unsustainable, ultimately identical to a Ponzi scheme and will fail sooner or later - I mean, I'm sure you could find the "mistake" that brought Madoff down.
"The real trick though is that most people just have normal bikes."

And as long as you're not traveling too far, it's a good source of exercise.
The Art of the Landing Page – Tips for Increasing Conversions
LOGO interpreter in JavaScript
1.8 is good enough, nothing compelling to switch
After yesterdays discussion about the barrier to entry to learn programming I searched for a bit and found this.

There is also an apple basic interpreter at http://www.calormen.com/Applesoft/

Maybe somebody has a kid or knows a kid that can benefit from this.
I wont even start trying to upgrade without ruby-debug. AFAIK, the only way to debug is by using print statements. I used to do that back in 1995 and its just too painful for me to consider. In my book a language isn't prime-time unless I can set a breakpoint and see what's going on.

I'm thinking about using JRuby instead though. It has comparable speed (considering its a 1.8) to 1.9 but has debugging capabilities.
I'd find a native English speaker to help write your copy.

Why would someone want to share their media contacts with the competition?
HAHA I'm from Connecticut.

Well this is aimed at small pr agencies or freelancers who can not afford the alternative. Which is very expensive.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't the point, but that's among the worst info-graphics I've ever seen.

- unreadably small

- no scale

- completely gratuitous circular presentation

Seriously. It's awful.
I think the team work and bonding carry over.
Ask HN: Allow multiple free accounts?
I want to keep this beneficial for everyone, so I won’t go into too much specific detail. Basically, we have two plans (the limited free plan) and then the paid plan. The free plan limits the # of images and projects a person can upload; the paid plan lifts many of those restrictions.

The problem is that a lot of people, at least a few thousand, have multiple accounts -- I’ve even seen a few people with three -- and this obviously means that they’re choosing to spread their files across multiple accounts rather than upgrading to the paid account. Now we have enough data from tracking IPs, etc., that we could go in and shutdown the multiple accounts and even stop duplicate IPs from signing up for another account, but the question is… should we?

Is it worth pissing off a few thousand people, but maybe convincing a few hundred to sign up for the paid plan? What would you do in this situation? Should we just let it slide and chalk it up to “at least they’re happy and probably telling their friends” or do something about it?
Anyone know if there is a big performance upgrade to the binary protocol?
The only real difference is the electric bike has some stubby pedals. The reality is that those moving up from electric bike will be moving up to motorcycles. Can't beat two wheels with Chinese traffic. Nanchang resident 6 years, electric bike user 4 years, motorcycle resident in 6 months.
Very educational
Just check the copyright at the bottom of the page.
Gauging Your Distraction
I think that the stories of Google's automatic GPA/school filter are a bit overblown. I got hired last December with a 3.0 GPA and November graduation date, which alone should've indicated that I was a complete fuckup in college (plus if they'd done the math, the 3.6ish GPA in my major meant that I must've been hovering around a 2.0 for courses not in my major). That was all on the top line of my resume, and they didn't care. I know folks here with degrees from Cal State or in rare cases no degree at all - they are a definite minority, but they did make it through the hiring process.

The one thing we all had in common was prior work experience and a passion for computers. I don't think you can get hired at Google with neither the degree nor experience - but then, should you be able to?
Remember that you're comparing MS in the 90s to Google today, which is an unfair comparison. When I worked at Google (2004-2007), a few of the smartest developers I knew didn't have college degrees. People like Aaron Boodman, who wrote Greasemonkey before he was hired, and was responsible for Google Gears. They were all one-off cases, who were either recruited for their skills or who tried many times until they finally got an interview. These people were hired directly into the engineering organization - it would probably have been easier to start as a QA contractor and then attempt to move up later (which is what Zeke did).

It's definitely an uphill battle if you don't have a CS degree from a top college. I will be the first to admit that having a top university on my resume made it significantly easier to get hired. Remember that, with the sheer volume of resumes that these companies get, it's impossible to interview everyone. I did a lot of phone screens, and of the people with exceptional resumes, about 90% weren't that impressive when you talked to them on the phone. It just wasn't possible to talk to everyone.

If you don't have a degree but are an exceptional programmer, getting a job at a top software company is going to take a lot more perseverance, but it is definitely doable. However, in most cases it's probably going to take more effort than just figuring out how to get the degree.
Lebedev: the oligarch, conspiracy theories and a mercury poisoning mystery
Artificial scarcity is a hard businessmodel to make work for the die-hard freeloaders.

You'll lose a bunch of them but they were not your best users anyway.

I've always tried to really differentiate the offerings between the 'free' and the 'paid' parts of the site so that multiple free accounts would not give you more than what you had when you had a single one.

But for artificial scarcity that does not work.

Isn't there some other metric where you can tighten the bolts without a simple workaround by your users ? Speed ?
i would try to display a polite message through the site to those specific users that makes it clear you know they are using multiple accounts and that your "cheap paid plans can easily be purchased [here]" or something. guilt them into it, but don't cut them off.
Update Ping.fm status messages from Terminal
I'm curious how you went from squatting 1 rep max of 135lb to 10 reps of 315lb in 6 month. It's quite a transformation. According to http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/SquatStandards.htm..., that puts you in the advanced percentile of men who weight 140-160lb which should take roughly, "multi-years of training (more than 2 years)."

How about many rep's per set and set per session did you do? And how pound increment did you add for each week?
Keep Track Of Your Twitter Followers And Have A Clean Inbox In Gmail
My Noogler class (Jan 09) was biased towards people with actual work experience. There were a couple of freshly-minted Ph.Ds, but most of us had been working for 4-10 years, and AFAIK the only fresh-out-of-undergrad had already done a couple internships with them. Very different from the demographics of the rest of company, where I occasionally get teased (lightheartedly) for having worked at a company other than Google.
There's differentiation between our two plans -- and more in the works -- but the "base" feature of being able to upload files (images and video) has to be on both plans. I think what you're getting at is the correct approach, though, and that's to continue to work on distinguishing the two.
I'm looking at it now. I'm working on OpenBSD, and just updated the port to libixp-0.5 - that'll get posted once I test it more.

A Lua client library for libixp should be pretty straightforward, looking at the source for ixpc. I might have that together this afternoon (particularly if my fiancee continues napping ;) ).

As for a server library, I'm still thinking about it, but passing an init function a table with callbacks for the various messages would be pretty straightforward - similar to LuaExpat's design (http://www.keplerproject.org/luaexpat/manual.html).

I'm silentbicycle on twitter, FWIW.
I think something like this might work actually. Keep it super polite and guilt trip them. "I see you've got two accounts, you know you're missing out on features X, Y, and Z unless you upgrade one plan."
Journalists still pursue stories aggressively. The difference is that in the 1960s and 1970s, the stories they pursued in politics surrounded things that mattered like wars and Watergate. Today, the only stories that journalists will pursue aggressively are rumours that Obama is going shirtless on a beach. Having spoken to editors of journalism sites before, I'd have to only partially blame that profession for the change. Readership numbers validate and promote this behaviour.

If you want to fix what's wrong with journalism, perhaps we need to start in the classroom by encouraging a culture that values literacy. Yes, science and math are also important, and they've been getting attention. But being able to read and write lengthy essays then debate them is also important. IMHO people flock to the stupid journalism stories because they don't have the comprehension skills to understand what the meaningful stories' implications for them are.
A few thousand out of 133,000 isn't a huge percentage. I would say that is bound to happen statistically, and you wouldn't want to divert resources to addressing it unless it was a significant percentage of your overall. Chances are those people who are willing to go to the effort to maintain multiple accounts wouldn't pay anyway.
Sadly, the website is registered to Microsoft (and Copyright Microsoft Staffing Marketing)it is a Wordpress blog running on Apache!

Edit: I don't mean to offend people in this community working for Microsoft. But this is one of the best example of why I hate marketing.

Visiting the website convinced me even more that using the open-source LAMP stack and an open-source CMS is easier than using Microsoft technologies. Even if you don't consider the additional costs because they would have been used their own products.
Ask HN: Twitter full access?
Recently I've come up with simple 'applications' of Twitter (amd related services like blogs and comments and whatnot) that for startups and other companies is easily worth $5 / month, I suspect I could build a monetazible product around it.

So I looked around, and it seems Twitter used to have a full 'firehose' feed, but they stopped providing it. You can get on a developer 'whitelist' where you can get a 'representative' feed, which still isn't the full thing. I want the full thing. I think a lot of services and mashups are using API calls such as 'search', but this is very limited, as I'd want all the other data in order to extract the relevant signals.

This is an unfortunate situation. I understand it's their product, but it seems like 'public resource'. To make a bad analogy, imagine if Larry Page and Sergey Brin couldn't crawl the web because most of it was on one companies' servers and they wouldn't let them --- it'd be our loss.

I found companies like gnip.com that seem to have access to the full Twitter data and are also aggregating other data. They're charging $1000 / year, which sounds reasonable, except I don't see a 'trial' to see what to expect. Also, how did they get full access and how much are they paying?

Any ideas and insights would be appreciated!
Well, it depends. Running the exact same operations through shows the difference to be negligible (the text paths were really optimized). Of course, there are some particularly bad (and rare) paths in the text protocol that don't have exact analogs in the binary protocol which helps to keep it cleaner.

However, clients can safely perform certain types of optimizations now that should lead to a lot of improvement.

One thing to know is that we get really high operation rates through the current version (higher than the really high operation rates we got through 1.2.8), but they're all generally faster than you can process them.

That is, we can generally saturate network interfaces before any other part of your servers.

This is to the point where some users replicate not for fault tolerance (because that's rather silly), but to increase read capacity.
"P.S. I don’t think she’s a whore because she’s a woman, I think she’s a whore because she’s in marketing. It’s important to understand the distinction." http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-18.html
The wikipedia page about astroturfing lacks a screenshot.

Just saying.
This must be a great business opportunity! What do electric bikes need?
> if you died anything but alone and penniless, you hadn't done your job. To me, that doesn't sound like a business plan for anyone on HN.

I think following the moral behind that quip makes it unlikely you end up alone and penniless :)
Geocities WAS around in 1996 - but Weebly was started in 2006/2007, and they're doing quite well, business model and all. The "website builder" space is likely not saturated, and there's definitely room in business areas such as the author was originally targeting. Again, it's all about the implementation.
What is the right feature size for a product release?
Well, people doing genetic modification work are working with Turing complete machines, though writing code is still a bit of a problem..
Is it possible that they're creating multiple accounts so that they can show different portfolios to different types of clients? I'm curious if this might be a workaround a missing feature instead of just trying to get by quotas.

(Perhaps you already support this, I just quickly played with the demo and didn't see it. If you don't offer it, it might make a nice feature to offer for paid accounts.)
Getting at twitters full datastream is not like Brin & Page not being able to browse the web, it's like you not being able to access googles internal datastore.

The other day there was a whole pile of internal twitter stuff being tossed around and one of the items there referred to the exact thing you are getting at.

I'm sure the real entity to ask is twitter, after all they have what you want.
There are a few places I've seen that try to formally bring in "smart people who didn't get a CS degree." Microsoft has or had an "apprentice program" aimed at smart people who never happened to pick up a CS degree. There's a little bit about it here
http://microsoftjobsblog.com/blog/microspotting/

I can't find any mention of it on the Microsoft jobs site. Maybe it's become a casualty of the recession. From what I can tell it started around 2006, so it would not have affected Zeke.

Berkeley used to have a "computer science re-entry program" aimed specifically at people who wanted to go to graduate school in CS but who had a degree in something other than CS, like, say music or history or whatever. The idea was to take people, then help them learn what they needed to know in a year or two, and finally help them navigate the grad school admissions process. A secondary goal was to increase the number of women and minorities in CS grad school. This worked well from what I understand, but a combination of funding cuts and Prop 209 killed it.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1008940
As someone who worked for the city of Los Angeles I doubt the security part of your claim is true. People assume the government system is so backwards that it must be inferior in every way but that backwards-ness actually makes it more secure because a lot of their documents aren't on a publicly available intranet. Their system is so antiquated that most transmissions are done via modems which, if you think about it, is more secure.

I'm not suggesting LA stay backwards for the sake of security. But once they jump into the world of putting docs on servers that can be accessed by the public there's going to be a lot of new risk involved. Google's security track record isn't exactly great (http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-failings-say-lit...) which makes me question the wisdom of trusting them simply because they're the cheapest option.

Put it this way. Next time you're bidding on a contract against a guy who will do anything to win how secure will you feel knowing all your private records (medical, divorce, business) are housed on Google Docs?
I love this! This is great! But I wonder from which marketing department this one come from.
Right. I don't even take my laptop to DEF CON any more. Besides no longer needing to worry about the wifi, it means I spend more time talking with people.

These days, though, you also need to keep an eye on your phone...
Minor word of warning. Scrolling through that document caused major cpu usage and my browser to lock for about 20 seconds. (Opera on Windows XP)
Vulnerability in FireFox 3.5.1 confirmed; exploit PoC
... a vulnerability is present in FireFox 3.5.1 that has had exploit PoC released. When exploited, the vulnerability can lead to system compromise or induce a DOS ...
Seems like disingenuous reporting. The article is clearly about Google providing gmail and apps hosting to universities. That's old news, and yes, it may make people more open to using Google services.

But what does this have to do with Chrome OS?
1) There is no confusion -- the physical and nutritional calorie are the same thing (EXCEPT that the nutritional calorie is usually the kilocalorie, or Calorie with a capital c, while the physical calorie is the plain old calorie). You have to remember that the calorie is an abstract unit.

The human body is a gigantic chemical engine, but it operates in a different way from a (jet/propulsive) engine.
It's like the difference between LiOn and NiCad batteries. You measure them both in volts or wattage output or hours, but they operate in fundamentally different ways -- you can't use the same chemical mixtures, even though those mixtures have the same potential energy as measured by some abstract unit.
What does Climate Model output look like?
Yeah, I think that's what is happening. We offer 5 projects for the free plan, which should be enough to show off your illustrations AND your photographs, but it seems as if some people want all or none.

We do allow people to hide projects, so if you just want to show off your illustrations you can do that by hiding your photographs, but still doesn't really combat people from wanting BOTH online at once.

...there's definitely some missing feature there, though, it's just not clear what it is.