skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But why not? Morally it would have been wrong to allow a leak of something that wasn't rightfully theirs when they had such a simple system set up to fix it all. It would have been wrong if they hadn't emailed every person who owned the book. It would have been wrong if they hadn't offered a refund. But they did, and they did. Amazon's been transparent about all of this.

Yes, morally it was wrong (though only by accident) for them to allow the leak. The problem is that they did allow the leak. It was done. You can't unbreak an egg and the only people for whom this came close to "fixing it all" where the publishers. The end users now do not have something they rightfully purchased. Yes, Amazon gave a refund, but that is not the same. Clearly the users valued having that book more than they valued the money otherwise they would never have purchased the book, so Amazon then took something without right or permission that was more valuable than what they gave back.

And they bore it, offered a refund, and sent out an apology. What sort of punishment do you expect them to have suffered otherwise? "Amazon must hang its head and look guilty cos it did a bad thing"?

I expect them to have worked out everything with the publisher so that the users who already made the purchase would not be bothered. This means paying any and all fees and fines applicable under copyright laws (or whatever they settled for with the publisher) for their accidental breach without the end users who already purchased in good faith being bothered in the slightest.
It's only a monopoly if there's a scarcity. There's no scarcity of music tracks; even if iTMS sells 99% of all tracks, unless they lock up the channel and prevent labels from selling to Amazon, there's nothing wrong with their dominant share.

I find the comparison between iTunes and Windows says more about the complainant than it does about Apple. Microsoft's monopoly prevented the development of competing technologies and enabled Microsoft to shut down entire sectors of the industry. Having the market's favorite music player doesn't prevent Amazon from selling music or Last.fm from streaming music or Microsoft from distributing Zunes.
That happened to the best friend of an old school friend of mine, too. Not even 30, prime of his life, just released first indie CD with my friend, everything going splendidly then suddenly - playing basketball one day, just falls over dead. The ambulance was there within a minute or two from the hospital right down the road - nothing they could do. No previous symptoms that anyone knew about.

It's customary to end an anecdote like this with a short "morsel of wisdom" summarising the above but shit, what can you say to that. Go to the doctor, folks. Checkup once every 2 years. Could save your life.
So, maybe it's just me, but I don't see why RFID is such a great thing for secure applications. Like, it's an awesome technology for a retail store to do inventory with. I mean, they can just pass a scanner near a bunch of products and figure out what they've got. Heck, each individual product can give a different ID which is even better than the simple barcodes that we use today.

However, why would one use RFID when you don't want the reading to be easy? There are plenty of technologies that require physical contact to transmit information (like mag strips or smart chips). If they want the passports to have to be inserted into a machine, they might as well use one of those technologies.

I'm all for RFID in its place. It's great for my subway pass so that I don't have to take it out of my wallet. Same for highway tolls where I don't have to stop. But neither of those are instances where I completely care about security. Sure, I don't want anyone cloning my subway pass, but it also isn't a window into my identity like my passport is and so I can choose convenience a bit over security there. Oh, a good example would be something like site passwords. Sure, I don't want anyone getting into my HN account, but it's not quite the same as someone getting into my bank account and, as such, I don't need quite as complex a password for it.

I'm not saying that I like the idea of chips in passports, but if you're going to put one in, why RFID? Why on earth didn't they choose something that requires physical contact to be read? I mean, the article focuses on the RFID problems (that it can be read without you knowing it since it doesn't require physical contact) and doesn't explain how on earth RFID became the choice. While one might not want to have a chip on their passport, at least a chip that needed physical access to read would put the holder (mostly^) in control of who got access to that information.

^I say mostly because there are always pick pockets and such that could swipe it without your knowledge, but that's a much lower risk than someone walking around with an RFID skimmer - it requires the person to physically remove it from your person, put it in a reader, and return it to you without you or anyone else noticing; not impossible, but a great deal less trivial.
Real slight noise of the web
There's a huge variance to both classes of crime, and there's overlap.

The central issue in torture is the complete and utter lack of control by the victim. That's what's truly violating. Knowing (or believing sufficiently strongly) that there's nothing you can do to stop this outrage. This can occur in many contexts, of which sexual assault is only one.

I would classify someone breaking another person's fingers methodically while telling the victim that he wants to "hear the sound" as torture. There's a level of malice and pre-meditation that's not present in a quick breaking.

I sometimes think that part of what makes rape worse for the victim is all of our societal hang-ups and power-mongering about sex.

In part they're a throw-back to the macho idea of protecting women's purity, and that women who have been "taken" are somehow impure. Talk about screwing the victim twice.

Yes, rape is very bad. But, society makes it worse by telling women that it's the worst thing that can happen to them (rather, than other torture or death, say).
Google Apps users to get OpenID authentication
As much as IE belongs in the bowels of software hell, and as much as Microsoft completely missed the boat for the Internet
and for the open-source software movement, kudos to this guy.
I'm much the same way--took a job right after high school doing bottom-feeder ISP tech support knowing absolutely nothing, started reading everything I could get my hands on about computers, networking, programming, and ended up being a pretty damned good software engineer.

Fuck CS college degrees, they're worthless--give me the autodidact guy who learned it all on his own anyday. And no, I'm not some guy who doesn't know CS--anyone want me to hand-hold you through
the steps to derive the existence of NP-Complete problems in Cooke's original proof? Or how about let's implement a red-black tree entirely from memorizing the algorithm?

Odd that Microsoft's culture has always followed the hacker ethos, caring only about how smart and capable you are to let you work for them, yet all of their software is crap, while Google will only stoop to maybe consider you if you have a CS degree from Stanford. Whether Google's software is all crap too, we need another 3-5 years to settle that decision.
Pragmatic Real-World Scala
But you can't open source anytime :)
Read the fine print in Microsoft's new application platform license
How many people know any great programmers who started programming any other way?
So now we know why IE sucks so bad.
I'm not proposing mangling anything here; in fact I dropped the mangled environment (as it was a hack, and added too much space) and swapped to a simpler (and cleaner) virtualenv built in /opt.

I still haven't fixed the build something and upload it for people, because of the hardcoded shebang, and yes - sed could fix that.
easy_install, when installed with setuptools, hardcodes the shebang fwiw
RFID is not even that much of a hit in retail, either. Some say, "yet". But widespread use of RFID in retail was "just around the corner" for several years, now.

As long as the technology is not cheap enough to (profitably!) slap an RFID chip on every 25 cent cup of yoghurt, it won't be ready for retail.

(At least that's the picture in Germany. But thanks to Aldi, Lidl and a few others --- most of our groceries don't even accept credit cards, because their razor-thin margins make them unable to swallow the fee. Debit card processing --- which is mostly free for the shop --- is nearly universal however. (Except for Restaurants; most accept only cash.))
I have nothing to publicly back this up, but I think in 10 years we'll be in a whole new world when it comes to creating software -- really, a whole new world. It won't be recognizable to those around today. It's exciting, and it's waiting for us.
Mozilla playing catch-up with Microsoft and Google
Ian and the guys at VRP are amazing, but this (COLA) isn't the blue plane switch they're looking for.
"Current CPU power 998 GFLOPS"

Doesn't seem like they have much computing power behind their project. You can get 8 times that with a single machine with 4 of the latest Nvidia graphics cards in them.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/PC-supercomputer,5513.html
Right, I'm saying that he was faced with a group of files he couldn't tar up, because the #! were all fixed. I'm wondering why he couldn't just replace '#!.*/python' with '#!/usr/bin/env python' for everything in the tree.
The misconception is about education itself, and not just CS. There is an overconfidence in instructionist educational systems(which means, an overemphasis in teaching), as opposed to a focus on learning.

Learning can take many, many forms, in all kinds of different backgrounds, because it is constructed by the individual attaching meaning to his experiences.

It is unfortunate that this happens, but projects like the OLPC is bringing constructionism(Seymour Papert's theory, based on constructivism). Lets hope we move to a deschooled society sooner than later.
I don't think the problem is the talent of the IE team. I think the problem is they disbanded the IE team for several years. At least, that's what I remember reading in the Founders at Work chapter on Blake Ross. In other words, it was an explicit management decision to not make IE better. In that situation, there is literally nothing the developers can do.
I had to walk a bit to think this through. My mind works best when walking.

I think touch screens will be cool toys for the toddlers, but adults will use something different. Think about it, your fingers are blocking your view just when you need it the most.

I don't know what will happen, but I hope some technology would get the drones out of those cubicles. Something like chorded keyboards and holographic eye-wear combined with wireless network.

If some country would start to teach the use of chorded keyboard in elementary school, it might be a huge leap for the economics of that country.

If you work in small room, your ideas will be smaller too, if you work while sitting, your mind will be sitting too.

Nowadays programmers work to make software for other people. That will change. In future people will increasingly do their own software as programming is already taught in some schools as a basic skill. And programmers will increasingly make software for other programmers as the percentage of programmers/workforce constantly rises.

Both of these will shape programming towards "write what you want, and the machine will optimize it for you".

Actually some of the programming might not be writing at all. Some people are way better with images than words, and even today dudes draw pictures to help themselves to grasp what they are doing. Look at well formed C and the python, indentation was meant to help, now in python it's the way of doing things. Same might happen for other stuff originally just meant to display the info a bit clearer.
And I can/could, and will probably still end up doing that as much as I might not like it - and any time you install something else which includes a script in a binpath, you need to rerun the sed command.
Good to know that in the U.S. at least, if the passport is closed, the RFID is shielded. Anyone know of a successful attack against a closed US Passport?
My personal experience is that the best, most imaginative software developers are mostly self-taught.

Passion for the topic is very important because a lot of what we do for a living is un-charted, un-mapped territory. The passion is required to get past mediocre.

I am a self-taught programmer. I tried to learn in school but my mind wasn't quite molded to the way programming teachers taught back then (1985-ish). So years later I re-visited programming on my own after DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 came out.

I got the bug and eventually became a professional. I now work on a large magnificent software library used by millions of people whether they know it or not (I won't say what it is).

I consider it a privilege and part of the journey to work with passionate, self-taught people who paved the way.

There would be a lot of empty seats without superstars if we only accepted Ivy types or excluded the self-taught.

I just couldn't be in this field if that were the case.
I also wonder where these figures came from: "Computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars, and 72 percent of the companies that got VC money over the past 15 or so years."

I see a lot of these types of statistics in articles about startup financing. As far as I know, there's no publicly available database of VC transactions.

Anyone know where these numbers could be coming from?
He mentions debt but not security.
Most banks won't finance a pre-revenue company without personal guarantees. And if you end-up borrowing against your own assets, you're basically financing yourself.
Why I Don't Want the Recession to End Yet
...like guarding an Ural2 during the night, which could not be turned off anyway, due to the tubes. Though you have to have connections to get the guard job though...
Add 0.1 already to make it 2.0

People like big increments, new versions, cool stuff to play with. It is all about marketing.

Like HTML 5, it's new and fun. It wouldn't be the same if it was HTML 4.1.5

Firefox should have been 4.0 instead of 3.5, it has more punch. Next version would be 5.0 and so on. But they missed it. Now we have Safari 4, Opera 10, Chrome 2.

Small increments are always associated with bug fixes.

Stop coding and start marketing.
I think 10 years from now we'll be dealing with the post-peak-oil world and will be worried more about how the garden is doing than what programming language we'll be using when the power is on. ;-)
Yeah, the aristocratic, "geek machismo" model of hiring conflates (weak) correlation with causation.

For me it's an anti-pattern that shows that such people lack a critical bit of intelligence and vision.

It's also a modern example of the Maginot Line fallacy.
They are useless vestiges of an age in which search didn't work, and maintaining a website for a project or product (and handling the bandwidth demands that entails) was harder than it is now.

They are the wrong tool for the job on the modern web, and they were never very good at it even when they did provide a tiny bit of value. In short, they're a waste of space.
Bootstrapping a Micro-ISV: Balsamiq Mockup Tool
I use this tool all the time at work. It is interesting how many of their sales come from the desktop version (which I purchased).
Google: We’re Not Really That Big; But If We Are, We Aren’t Bad
It will take a long slow slog while early-adopters get the gem ecosystem to the point cost/benefit equation hits a tipping point. The tipping point will involve hosting provider support and having more things in the ecosystem working than not.
Maybe not Hacker News per se, but a very good analysis.

I suppose the Hacker News angle is looking at the poor journalism (or lack thereof) being done by the large media corporations, and consider hacks that can be used to beat them. What are some ways that a news startup could tell the truth and get attention, with a sustainable business plan?
My co-workers and I play Left 4 Dead at lunch. The game requires intense team-work for you to succeed. Since we started playing, the best of us have gotten so much faster, more perceptive, and attuned to the notifications and strategies of the game. When we're playing well, it's awesome. Pure flow and desperate competition. It takes me about an hour to come down off the high of a good game.

Thing is, there's another game -- kind of a real-time-strategy one. It's called life. I wonder what else we could have done with those hours? :(
> Actually I agree that folks who want a really great set of speakers probably should go for a reputable brand of studio monitors and appropriate amp (these days some studio monitors are powered and need no amp).

Right. This is what I keep telling anyone who's interested. Of course, most people are blissfully oblivious to quality (wrt. lots of things)

My speakers are powered though. I'd have no idea what kind of amp to get.

> Magic cables that cost hundreds of dollars

A timeless classic :) Some time last year, I was investigating headphones, and came across a pair of Grados at some shop.

I mentioned that the earpieces felt abrasive, and the "helpful" shop owner suggested I buy a pair of thicker, fluffier ones for around 50 euros. Yes, 50 euros for two pieces of foam or whatever. "THIS.. IS.. FINLAND!!"

He claimed, with a straight face, that the headphones would sound better with the thicker earpieces too, "because they're shaped to better direct sound into your ears" .. :P

> a good sounding room is at least as important as the speakers you put in it

This is particularly unfortunate for me, since I live in a crummy apartment with concrete walls. There's not much I can do about acoustics, short of a considerable (and very costly) renovation.

I bet your Rock Band Taco Nights are awesome :)

By the way, what kind of headphones would you recommend? I'm leaning towards Beyerdynamic DT880(PRO?)'s.
A lot of applications are also moving to the cloud as a service. Not all, but a lot. And a lot of them are distributed directly by the developer(s) increasingly as bandwidth and storage become cheaper by the day
I'd say that the Pro nomenclature is meant to raise expectations anyway, and it's certainly true that Macs are used almost exclusively by his kind of professionals. Not an unreasonable expectation then.
Also, you have to run the sed command over the tree every time you install a new package which installs a binary
Also, you have to run the sed command over the tree every time you install a new package which installs a binary

How often do your projects depend on something else, written in python, that installs a binary? For me that number is zero. iirc all of my python dependencies are libraries. And if I stumbled into something that comes with a binary, with a broken hashbang line, then I'd be rather motivated to not only fix it, but to also feed the fix upstream. If the project is useful enough for me to use it then those 10 minutes of my time for a brown-paper-bag micropatch are a no-brainer.

Well, to each their own. - But I still think this is a solution looking for a problem, with the potential to create more problems than it solves.
I know this question wasn't directed at me, but as another small OS developer, I'll give you an additional perspective.

I'm developing a kernel (and later an OS around it) called XOmB. It's an exokernel design.

Originally, we started our project as a reason to learn the D language. We were tossing around project ideas, and someone brought up an OS. We started bouncing around some ideas, and we decided that this could actually be a pretty cool project. In addition, the systems space is interesting, because you hear less about it. A lot of people are interested in web apps, or desktop apps, but not nearly as many people are interested in systems. Most of the time, this is due to a supposition that systems are 'too hard for me.' We wanted to help educate others, and try to get more people interested in systems programming.

As far as uniqueness goes, first of all, there hasn't been a real exokernel written yet. The original paper had a small one with it, but it was mostly just for the paper, nothing huge. We're also writing a lot of documentation, and trying to aim it at a beginner. We started a spin-off project named XOmB Bare Bones that does all of the lowest-level work for someone who would want to write an OS in D, letting them jump straight to kmain. About 35 pages of documents were written on this process, with code citations and such... we hope to have our full kernel documented in this way.
Congratulations! It's always good to see that other people's OSes are going well.
FSF: Microsoft, the Community Promise isn't enough
Pingie Hits 1 Million Texts and New Features
You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It's worked for many people, and it can work for you.

-- Ron Minnich
Please don't post links that require readers to pay to read them. This post should go 'dead'.
Not to mention, when I got into Ruby, 1.9 was seen as a developer only release, then suddenly it got upgraded to "stable" and was meant for everyone.
Are you suggesting that people should not express dislike of YC-funded companies here? I don't think we really want to encourage the creation of taboos like than here.
It's my understanding that that's about the point in time when the hiring bar started rising

I thought it was the opposite. Google always emphasized GPA and where you went to school. They loosened things up quite a bit during their great hiring sprees of 2006-2007.

Maybe recently they've reverted to their old policies because they hired so many duds during that time period.
I saw a comment form recently where there was a field labeled 'Are you human?', if you enter 'yes' your comment is not marked as spam. I wonder how well silly but obvious questions, to humans at least, can stop spam? From a UX perspective it's slightly less effort than deciphering a CAPTCHA box. It's not as thorough a solution as CAPTCHA but is super quick to implement.
Don't all computer games give an illusion of accomplishment? Isn't it just a matter of degree?
We don't need to stretch the definition of hacking to be interested in something.
Social Skydiving Day 25: Good Morning Criticism
Google will probably do a better job in every way, including security, than the city of L.A. I'm sure leaks from city employees or people stealing physical paper will far outweigh any IT related leak.

The funniest thing about this article is it is supposed to scare you that L.A. is switching to google services, but the article mentions Washington D.C. is already doing it.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=711706
where there is already some discussion.
I don't disagree, I just wouldn't have expected a rant about it and thought I was missing something.
I can do it but you couldn't pay me enough to do it...
Totally agree. Many of the most impressive people I've met were fuckups in HS, which pretty much blocks you from a great college. Google is basically selecting for people who either grew up really fast or had parents bully them into academic performance. Of course, they are also selecting for people who have a great work ethic, aren't stupid, and largely play by the rules.

Out of curiosity, how would you thin the applicant herd? Say you have 10,000 resumes sitting on your desk for a CS job. You can't read them all so you need to set a few automatable/arbitrary rules to get the pile down to 50 or so. What rules do you use? Years of experience? Google HR can't take the time to get to know 10,000 people.

What Google does is incredibly imperfect, but to trim their resume flow down to a smaller number they haven't made a terrible choice. What's a better one?