skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a little bit nervous to say this, but this is another of Jeff's articles where I think "man, so many of this guy's problems would go away if he didn't hate Macs so much".

In my experience, Mac devs don't hate software, and Mac users don't have the instinctive "oh [App X I haven't heard of]? That's going to suck".

Gruber talked more about this in his Broken Windows essay -- http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows -- and what he said about security is generally true for quality and polish as well. If I get a new app for the Mac, I know that it's going to have basic standards of fit and finish and will make a reasonable attempt at being a good Mac citizen, because otherwise the community will kill it.

When a new Mac app comes out, I'm usually fairly optimistic about what it will do. When a new Windows one appears, I'm sceptical.

This doesn't extend all the way to the quality of coding admittedly, but certainly at least until the iPhone came out Cocoa devs were a fairly select set of committed people, and the higher barrier to entry helped keep at least some of the crappiest C&P coders out of the platform.
Yeah, "security by obscurity" seems like the only way to do it really. It's sort of like DRM; a DVD is encrypted, but your DVD player needs to know how to decrypt it, and since you have both items, the information for HOW to decrypt is in there somewhere, so you just need to figure it out...
I must admit, I was a bit disappointed. I was expecting an article on why attempting to maximize followers is doing yourself and your ideas a disservice.
China and "our standard of living"
RE: point #1 - I concur. Maybe it would be helpful to filter out nationally trending topics from your local list. After all I (user) only really care if something locally is different.
would have taken the time to register to comment

Didn't think of it that way. If you think the post would help people, I could cross-post. Or you could post a link and/or copy & paste the text, if you'd like.
What you say is true - manufacturing techniques have changed more than he lets on, it's not all labour. However I still think he makes a good point when he says "it's going to cost" us. We talk about how living conditions need to improve in 3rd-world countries, but we buy products that exploit that system. We talk about how gas prices need to come down, but most people haven't changed their driving habits. We talk about how the economy needs to improve, but banks are still offering irresponsible mortgages.

He does exaggerate the situation somewhat, but it's true that people will generally ignore issues that aren't immediately in front of them, and fail to take responsibility for their own way of life.
Well, looks like their PR department does great work, indeed. But it's not just their token medical school - I think their business school and law departments have also been "world changing institutions", just maybe not in a positive way.

Anyway this idea of having elite schools for an elite class is dangerous. Just look at the list below. Nepotism and class segregation by proxy, that's all Harvard is. Oh lookie, there's Obama! He went to Harvard, replacing GWB, who - surprise - went to Harvard. And the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who replaced the old CEO who also went to Harvard! What a coincidence.

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

Make no mistake. Harvard is "The Man" writ in bricks and stone. I am not very much a fan of The Man, which is why I am not unhappy to see The Man in trouble financially. But no worries, if things really get bad I'm sure a bailout's on the way.
Non Contact Infrared Thermometer Temperature Laser Gun
These guys had all of the PR a new company could ask for, and they completely fell on their face. While I'd love to see more competition in the search space, I think the hill is even steeper this time for Cuil. Their name could use some work too.
"'Statistics show that people, especially young people, are much, much more likely to click on a URL if they see it in a blog or Tweet from someone they trust. This clearly has a big impact on Web marketing and is leading a number of companies to develop tools to track and target these social influencers,' he says. 'But whether it will really jive with search isn't as clear to me.'"

I wonder how those statistics are gathered? I am indeed much more likely to follow a link if a friend recommends the link. (For this purpose, "friend" on HN would mean person with high karma who has reliably recommended good links before, if the domain of the link is unfamiliar to me. I'm very chary about following unfamiliar links to unfamiliar domains unless a closer friend, someone I know from an email list ideally, recommends the link.) But I do still follow links from Google, because I count on Google to filter out nefarious links with spyware or malware. It's still not clear to me why I would even start using Cuil again, after its epic fail at launch last year.
Integrating social networks into search engines just sounds like something straight out of a web 2.0 idea generator. I don't see how this will be useful at all. I'm gonna make a guess that the kind of highly general searches this would be good for (like band names used in the article) is only a tiny portion of most actual searches. Even then, people might rather just ask their friends if they want this kind of information.

Another thing, the vast majority of links shared by my friends are hardly informative, maybe weird, funny, awesome, etc., but few people post stuff on Facebook like they would on HN. Without context, they will only clutter up the search.
But isn't the same fat cats that got the whole business in trouble to begin with?

So what makes them so valuable?
Who caused the economic crisis?
Awareness of your own limits, and the likely quality of your work, is a good thing.

But this descends into self-flagellation. Waaaah, I suck, you suck, we all suck. We're all the equal-worst programmers EVER.

If you're doing research into programming languages, and you're explaining your work, or asking for funding, fine.

But coming from practicing programmers, it's a common, trite, pointless and irritating refrain containing zero useful information.
My Engineyard Contest Odyssey
That's pretty cool. The thing is, I'm actually not looking for a "conn" (connection" of any sort). I'm thinking of database as a container class. Kind of like...

db = New db

db.addTable(colname, list[names], primaryKey)
db.addTable(joinTable, foreignKey, colname, list[names])

Map a = db.(select col a, col b from ...)

db = nil

and so forth... in other words, we're going the opposite direction from database as storage. Instead, we're going to database as something that is as in-memory as a hash (probably more likely to be persisted at some point, but not necessarily).

Sometimes, I see classes created that are bending over backward to recreate a bit of sql, and the model and logic really only exist for one purpose - sql-like methods on the data. People rarely write their own list, set or map classes, but often they will essentially recreate a bug-ridden 1/2 of common sql in their app...

Anyway, looks like you've been thinking about this for a while, I'll definitely take a look at the link. Thanks for posting it.
I use my Google Voice number on my resume, to prevent recruiters from calling my cell phone directly. I've noticed that clear speakers with the classic "TV American" dialect are transcribed pretty well. However, if they have even the slightest bit of a different dialect, especially Indian or Southeastern US, or if they mumble a bit, then it's hilariously bad.

Stuff like this:

hi zack this is anyhow calling from a car
and i actually i was looking part of the
apartment but i might come across your profile
on the google search in hi i understand you're
looking for approximately 400 caveman income
which is definitely i can talk to you but i
was just wondering that if you know anyone and
some yesterday and so and relatives so of
because the anyway i was looking for a job
for their business hey can you please a
deficit to me on my email address is and and
it's shannon N T S as in sam but i am E T
oddity of I T dot com i repeat it and and
at the car dot com on if you can divert my
call at 84 so i'm fine i need to little
photo a photo extension 8 if i'm not i repeat
841 598 double total of 4 extension 8811 that
would be great thanks so much for your time
Here's my quick back-of-the-napkin estimate:

Given that the winning teams seemed to be running clusters of around 20-30 systems full-bore for >24 hours, the power draw would be something like 500 watts * 20 systems * 24 hours, giving us something on the order of 240 kWHr consumed per team. (Some teams may have consumed far less, but the successful ones seemed to be running many CPU or GPU cores on relatively high-spec servers.)

According to the DoE[1], the average CO2 emissions for power generation nationwide is 1.3 pounds per kWHr. Given that, we're get about 312 pounds of carbon per team. A single cross-country airline flight can produce several thousand pounds of carbon, so all told, the contest probably has a small carbon footprint than a major business sales meeting or small tech conference.

1 - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2...
When a company is struggling, reversing the trend through sales growth is usually not the answer. That's certainly an important component after the emergency turnaround stage, but you have to get the business on a stable cash flow footing before doing that, and that means intelligently cutting costs.

There are many, many businesspeople who think "selling more" is the best way out of a turnaround situation. Most of them fail.
How much time do business schools spend on managing investments? It sounds like its own specialty, but I don't know where one learns it.
Yes. It just increases the price-differentials, until drug smuggling pays enough again.

Escaping for humanitarian reasons will be made more difficult. And we do not want to rely on arbitrage there.
Yeah that's true, and I definitely think that Ubuntu is trying to move in a more user-friendly direction than traditional Linux mindsets. In any case - what has been your experience with the "troubleshoot" tools in Windows? It's not that I'm arguing the point with you, I really do think they seem easy to use. My only problem, is that it's never actually succeeded in fixing or diagnosing the problem I was having. Am I alone in this?
Seriously lame. Flagged.
Could you clarify what you're talking about? Sex? Drugs? Is suicide the desire you're talking about?
Pubic transport is one of the prime examples of this.
We need to save money:

OK we will cut routes, put up fares, reduce number of trains/buses.

So there are now fewer people wanting to use the more expensive overcrowded unreliable service, OK we will have to make more cuts.

Eventualy you aren't actually running any trains but are still paying for all the fixed cost infrastructure.
My experience is that recruiters (and other people who leave a lot of voice mail) seem to be relatively easy for Google Voice to transcribe:

"matt hey this is todd johnson i work over dates 10 capital hey i wanted to see if you knew of anyone open for new projects we've got up i've done contract role that just popped in if you have a chance feel free to give me a call (206) 300-2120 to seattle based company python project 6 months see if you might be interested in that again this is todd johnson over it's 10 capital thanks"

Whereas casual callers talk faster and tend to get transcribed like this:

"hello it's sarah this is christal donna considering it's jamie at coming thanks bye"

What I really like is the feature in the new Android app that highlights each work of the transcript while playing the audio, and lets you skip to any word just by touching it.
You got that from techcrunch? They made it up.
Yahoo will take forever to integrate. Mail is an enormous system. I cannot imagine this will go well or quickly.

Goodbye, Xoopit, we hardly knew you.
Given liquidity preferences, it is more likely that founders did poorly than VCs did.
Announcing the SSL Server Rating Guide and the Public SSL Server Database
In my experience, the people on the Ubuntu forums only know how to solve trivial problems. There are tons of searches in Google that result in links to the forums where somebody is asking "Hey, this is my situation, can anybody help me?" only to see a response that is irrelevant or no response at all. I had to dig through the X.org wiki, which isn't terribly good documentation, to figure out how to disable mouse acceleration (after experimenting with where to put the settings).

Regarding the article: many of these points seem really vague or really nit-picky, like the bit about drive encryption.

I also agree with you about Ubuntu not trying to be Windows. I think they want to instill the paradigm if you're going to change a setting, be prepared to do it as a superuser or root ahead of time. Linux security isn't going to change to be more like Windows security.
Let's say that you have an application that one part of your company has developed for use in several other sites your company runs. This application sits in an iframe. You want to make sure that it's only being used on sites from the *.example.com domains.

So, you set a cookie in the .example.com domain, and then, on the server side, you create a one-way hash of that cookie and a key phrase (a crumb), and put it on the url of the iframe.

The key phrase doesn't have to be particularly secret, it's mostly for convenience so that you can use the same cookie and hash function in multiple different applications without getting the same crumb everywhere for a given user. So, if a crumb is leaked, it's only going to expose one thing, not everything. Also, if you make it time-dependent, then it further limits the exposure.

The iframe validates that the crumb in the query string matches the one-way hash that it gets by performing the same one-way hash against the cookies and the key phrase.

Yahoo uses this technique all over the place. It's very effective as long as the crumb function is sufficiently clever. However, if your crumb is brute-forcible, then it can be exploited easily.
Ask HN: Learn a language + Get a grip on Mac + Industry exposure + Grades
I had bought a Macbook Pro recently and had coded a bit on SPOJ (https://www.spoj.pl/status/l0nwlf/signedlist/)...mainly in Python. As an engineering student we have to do a project this semester (July 20 - Nov 30) and according to me this is a great way to learn something new and interesting and also get grades out of it.

Well, so the requirement of the University-Project I'm planning to do IMO is ,

Platform : Unix like ( strict no to windows)

Language : Python, can go for other languages like Objective C but python is my primary choice

Orientation : Something industry-oriented so that I can boast of it, say after I graduate

Scalability : Can be completed within 1 semester

Objective : Learn a language, get familiar with my MBP

In a recent discussion following on the line of my requirement someone gave the idea of 'Integrating Launchpad and Wave' which I'm not sure can be practical but it was a good idea. However I'm looking forward to ideas from HN.
Ask HN: Is TMZ more "honorable" than TechCrunch?
Everyone read TechCrunch's reasons for publishing stolen internal Twitter documents. Now, there's a "stolen" video of ESPN's Erin Andrews that's being shopped around to places like TMZ. And since I happen to watch TMZ, I've noticed Harvey Levin mention over the last couple of days that he won't air any of the footage b/c it's a blatant invasion of privacy.

It goes without saying that there's a difference b/w internal documents and a nude video, but both are stolen and both are "newsworthy" (in a sense that readers want to read/watch them). I just wonder where TC and others draw the line. In fact, maybe TMZ should've gone one step further and not even mention the video exists in the first place.
Anyone think of the movie Antitrust?
In my opinion, there's one critical thing which is keeping Linux out of the non-nerd workstation market, and that's X11.

The windowing system is slow, yet takes more CPU than Windows. Animations (flash, the progress bar in fullscreen gnome-mplayer) bog down the system on low-end graphics cards (which saturate the market in the consumer desktop/laptop market). Scrolling a window up and down can be enough to lag the system into unusability.

Microsoft invests hundreds of engineers on making the graphics system fast and responsive on any kind of graphics hardware. Linux needs to catch up in this field before they can play with the big boy. Someone needs to do something with X11.
Why make a big stink about calculus?

To a smart person, after learning about it, calculus is simple and self-evident. The rate of change of something is the slope, and to find it at a point you take two points arbitrarily close together. The rate of change of the area under a curve IS the curve. That's calculus, and the details of the rest follow.

Why not give a bright young person those insights and let them play?

They never teach the really interesting and cool parts about calculus. How many people know that the rate of change of volume of a sphere _is_ the surface area, for instance? It makes wonderful sense.
"How do I know, incontrovertibly, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the world is full of incompetent programmers? Because I'm one of them!"

Those who can, code. Those who can't, blog.
I read a book called "My Job Went to India" (it's a tongue-in-cheek tutorial of how to stay competitive in the computer industry) and one of the advice was:

Always be the worst on your team.

The idea is, of course, not to suck but to put yourself on a team with people that are more awesome than you, because that's how you grow. People usually do a double-take when I quote this, though. :-)
Comparing Apples to Oranges
> We talk about how living conditions need to improve in 3rd-world countries, but we buy products that exploit that system.

You should buy more stuff from the third world, if you want to help them. Not less.

> We talk about how gas prices need to come down, but most people haven't changed their driving habits.

Not a problem. High gasoline prices are good for the environment.

> We talk about how the economy needs to improve, but banks are still offering irresponsible mortgages.

If the banks can afford the offer and you think it's a good deal, why not take it?
I remember that scene from "War of the Roses" where the Danny DeVito character tells the horror story of the Roses to talk a new client out of engaging in an ugly and bitter courtroom battle. I think his line was (paraphrasing here) "when a man who could charge you $250 an hour wants to tell you something for free, you should listen."

I often feel that way about software. Remember the stages of a software project?

1) wild enthusiasm
2) profound disillusionment
3) search for the guilty
4) punishment of the innocent
5) rewards and accolades for the non-participants

Can't remember exactly where I read that, but software developers have experienced them all, over and over.

I don't necessarily try to talk people out of a new development effort. After all, there are clearly times when we need to write software, and some projects are smashing successes. But I kind of feel like that breed of lawyer who tries to get clients to see litigation as a true last resort.

I say - is there anything already out there that could solve your problems without a new development effort? How far would a much simpler approach go toward solving your problems - could you live with it? Basically, I want clients to understand just how risky a full blown development effort truly is.

Of course, if you need business... well, nothing like an angry divorce to keep the billable hours up, and nothing like a flailing software project funded by deep pockets to keep the cash flow positive....
Beautiful Examples of Workstations for Your Inspiration
Hacker News Readers of NOVA/DC meetup at 7pm this Sunday (July 26th)
What I find pretty fascinating is that according to their numbers the 14 GPU cores were performing about 1.5 times as many hashes per second as the 115 CPU cores were.
Copy-and-past comics are a pain to look at.
Yes. Americans have chosen to take on those obligations in the past.
These would be richly funny if they were not so entirely true.
"jibe", not "jive". http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/jibe

While we're at it, "home in", not "hone in".

I am angry at language as used!
This was interesting, and speaks to my own experience.

In high school, I did the local quals for the international math, physics and chemistry olympiads. I did quite well on the physics and chemistry ones and went to the international versions as part of the Swedish teams. On the math one, though, I plain sucked. In post-processing, I've realized that what happened was exactly what this article talks about. The math questions were questions where I just went "Huh? I have no idea how to even approach this," because my math education had largely only prepared me for solving specific kinds of problems. I'd never been exposed to things like proving theorems or other kinds of creative thinking.
Get out, see the world, look at other peoples' code (particularly the stuff they don't release publicly), and I can guarantee you will be surprised at what people can make run.

I believe there is a saying that there will always be [code] better than [yours]. The opposite is also true: There is always code out there which is worse than yours.
> You should buy more stuff from the third world, if you want to help them. Not less.

To a certain extent, true. If they don't have sweatshops to work in, they end up in worse situations, like prostitution. My point was that people criticize the conditions in other countries, and the corruption - but they don't stop and think about how that's partly why they have the lifestyle they do.

> Not a problem. High gasoline prices are good for the environment.

Only if people change their driving habits accordingly, and I know very few people who have actually altered their lifestyle. Increased sales of hybrids and less driving is a good thing, but it happens relatively rarely compared to complaints against OPEC.

> If the banks can afford the offer and you think it's a good deal, why not take it?

Because that's exactly how the housing bubble collapsed. My point is that the banks should offer deals they think they are good, but people shouldn't be complaining about the economy when they have mountains of debt themselves. I know a couple of people who have over $10G of credit card debt, and just got mortgages with no down payments. They also have no formal education and poor employment. How is that GOOD for the economy? It's good for the bank, yes, but the irresponsibility has been a major factor in the slow economy.
However, I find myself voting up some articles that I wouldn't recommend, but the comments have lots of value.
Yet another attempt to explain continuations
Welcome to Hacker News where we downvote useful information.
Snakes are another good example (albeit they lost their legs over a much longer time scale).
Their name could use some work too.

Yes, I can't even keep track of what the canonical pronunciation of "Cuil" is. I know that the company doesn't want us to think "epic fail" when we see "Cuil," but that's what usually happens for me.