skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends. But pretty much, no, I can't.

Contributing to Microsoft-owned open source projects is acceptable, in some cases. A small number of products are run in an open-source manner within Microsoft, and actively recruit contributers inside the company.

I don't want to talk too much about internal policy -- I'm sure the legal office (LCA) wouldn't appreciate me pontificating about how cracked-out I think their opinions on F/OSS are -- but in general, 'forbidden' would be a good description, both for contributing and just reading code. There are exceptions, but they have to go up several levels of management and be directly work-related to be approved. (I think MSR is a different world, though.)

Honestly, most devs I know are too slammed with work as it is to keep up with a large-scale F/OSS project after hours. Every once in a while you get enough of a breather+motivation do small hobby projects and keep up with new technology.

The F/OSS restriction is the #1 thing I don't like about my job, but honestly, it's about the only thing.
Tread carefully; in some cases it might legitimately be two users behind the same NAT or on the same computer.

Or, people whose main motivation isn't avoiding the payment but getting some other benefit -- two identities? -- from two accounts. In which case, making sure a single paid account has the same benefits could help.

If you start to crack down, you might want to mix it with a bump-up in free quotas. "Even as we are more generous with our free accounts, we need heavy users to subscribe..."

It also sounds like the population is large enough to try some A/B approaches to get them to sign up -- more steps in logout/login (if they're using a single browser), an option to merge accounts, interstitial upgrade appeals, etc.
still too small for comfort, and the graph isn't served well by the circle.. hard to compare 2 things of similar success.. compared to a bar graph etc..
Voting is no match for the tyranny of the majority. (Look at how well it worked for California; gay marriage is illegal, tax increases are illegal, and the state is bankrupt. Sometimes, you need to elect a trusted representative that can balance all the issues at once.)
I wish I could rotate the graph, that would make it easier to read.
I'm confused. While the title is for v3.5.1, the details say v3.5.

It should be noted that this is a medium vulnerability and the chances of running into is are impossible according to one commenter.
Information Overload Syndrome (video)
To make the chips harder to clone, try including a physically unclonable function as part of the authentication:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physically_Unclonable_Function
What kind of latencies are you aiming for?
"Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) +
"Hey. My name is Ariel and I'm a total whore...for Microsoft that is!" = flag
Astroturfing implies that something is not true.

Not at all! Astroturfing is not about lying, it's about creating a false impression of disinterested third party opinions, when the whole thing is controlled by an interested party.

This site straddles the line. They're not hiding their MS affiliation, but they're not drawing attention to it either. The suggestion is that there's this cute emo girl who wanders the halls of Microsoft because she just loves being around guys like this. Let's face it, having a girl like this be fascinated with the details of our work probably ranks pretty high on (male, heterosexual) hacker fantasies. And that was the whole point.

Furthermore the probably astroturfed comments also give us a false impression that other people think MS developers are pretty rad.
In America, our debit cards are rigged so they work just like credit cards. This gives you some extra protections, delays when they draw from your bank account, (theoretically) gives you the protections of the merchant's agreement, and for many banks you get some sort of cash-back benefit from it.

You can also pay with PIN if you want. That makes it post to your bank account quicker, which is nice if you keep track of your online banking.
I just checked and interestingly I also depend on easy_install (which I don't even use, but put it in there someday), nose and pylint. None of them gave me problems. I say if fabric and PIP are broken then fix them.

easy_install is irrelevant anyways, nobody in their right mind would use that on a production system.
Beware of this Antivirus Scam | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Really...and here we thought SElinux was supposed to be 'more secure'. I love linux, and could read through the kernel source all day long, its freakin' beautiful, and have utmost respect for its developers. But I can't help but laughing when someone finds a vulnerability in the code, because...well you know how those kernel guys are...:-)
An interesting tangential question would be:

How do you disallow multiple accounts if you really don't want them at all? I.e. I have a multiplayer game and I really don't want users to have multiple accounts because it might spoil the game experience. How do I disallow multiple accounts?
More importantly, I have to tilt my head to read anything. Who decided this was a good idea? At least keep the text rotated right if you have to make a circle graph.
I think China has become the new Godwin's Law - you're inventing a straw man instead of addressing this specific scenario.

The illegality of the book here has nothing to do with political pressure or information control. It is a simple matter of someone who didn't own something trying to sell what he didn't own.
Your CPU Came From Sand
I'm so glad to see other companies actually picking up the slack on space exploration. Hopefully they'll continue to pick up steam since it's looking like government funded exploration is more and more dead.

There's no reason that anyone under 30 today can't at least visit space cheaply in the future, unless we just give up.
Retrieve customer profiling information in < 10ms
I think you're taking it out of context - I think it's meant for things that are said on HN itself, not in articles linked to from HN.
Juan Maldacena: The Illusion of Gravity [pdf]
To put this in perspective:
When Mike talks about this stuff, he's coming from a position of "This is serious business. The point of my job is to make this run 10,000 times in 0.1 milliseconds. It can be done. It's not that hard. Why are you screwing up simple stuff like this?" The code he was reviewing was inner-inner-inner-loop, performance critical logic. That stuff doesn't always spring fully-formed from the standard library. Sometimes you have to write it yourself. When its your turn, it would be worth heeding the advice of someone like Mike -who has spent a good part of his career figuring out how to do it well.

As for the arrogance... I've seem Mike speak live on this topic. He hams-up the attitude because it gets a reaction from the audience. He's trying to irritate you into improving yourself. To his discredit, very little of what he is complaining about has much to do with C++.
The thing I love about HN: The original post was up-modded 88 points and has over 60 comments that are actually very interesting debate about elements brought up by that submission. There's a few folks pointing out the astroturfing suspicion.

"On Topic: ... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"

I agree with you. This submission isn't of the type I come to Hacker News to view.

On similar sites, the original post would have never made it to the front page and the comments on both would have been only about astroturfing and Microsoft hatred. ...Which is why I don't comment or waste time reading the comments on those similar sites.
I'd be less embarrassed to say I worked at a gas station than that I was Principal software developer on Internet Explorer
This is a linguistic tar pit from which there is no escape. Run away while you still can!
And, contrawise, when I went to Australia (coming from Norther California) and was told that I didn't have to tip 18% on all restaurant meals, I was actually _incapable_ of not doing so. So, even though it meant out of pocket money for me, It was better than having to deal with (completely false) belief that the serving person would think I was a total dick for not tipping them.

Getting back on topic (slighty) - I've had about $200 in cash in my pocket for the last couple months - I don't recall the last time I've been somewhere that I didn't use my Credit Card. Makes tracking my expenses via Mint.com a heckuva lot more straightforward.
It wasn't a straightforward interview. It was a subtle form of astroturfing.

PR is all about context. They try to dissociate the site from Microsoft (visually) to imply these are disinterested opinions. And in particular, that there's this cute young emo woman who wanders the halls of Microsoft entranced with the dreamy, rebellious hackers. The subtext, if you're a heterosexual male programmer, is that working for MS gets you the kinds of attention you've always wanted. And that real rebels ought to be working for Microsoft.

All absurd, which is why they had to be subtle about it. If the sexual innuendo is said out loud -- as in a parody -- you then realize what's happened. It's debatable whether the tone is HN-appropriate, but I thought it made legitimate points, despite or perhaps because of the crudeness.
I think the theory of game play is fascinating, and some of those games were very clever in their design. But I feel as though using only the Sunk Cost Fallacy, as the author calls it, to motivate a player to finish your game isn't enough. I play games for fun, and I think that games that keep you doing repetitive behavior just because you've already so much of it start to feel more like a job than a game.
I agree fully, Google has one of the most convoluted and non-sensical recruitment models I've ever come across.

When I was in university I was doing a cross-discipline degree in mechanical and electrical engineering. Not your usual hacker program to say the least. I, however, coded like mad in my spare time (and have since primary school), and even found ways to incorporate a lot of software into the decidedly mechanically-slanted work I did in school.

I worked at numerous software companies during this time as an intern - Apple, Amazon, and a couple of smaller ones people have no doubt never heard of :) They seemed to like the work I did as well, since all of them invited me back for a second go.

Google, however, never touched me. I applied to their dev positions again and again (for internship and full-time) and never got a peep back except the occasional "you don't fit anything we have right now, but thanks!" message. I even got recommended by someone who worked there, and that was still no dice.

I also noticed that, despite the number of interns Google was hiring from my school, almost all of them were CS students, very few engineering students, and certainly none outside of the traditional computer engineering departments.

In the end, near graduation, I was courted by Microsoft, Amazon, and a few smaller companies, and Google still hasn't given me a dev interview ever :P
It's worth noting that this is a pathological NULL deference case, but that over the last couple years researchers have begun to make an art out of finding straightforwardly-exploitable NULL dereferences, particularly in the kernel; on some platforms, +0h is natively dereferenceable, and some dereferences are done with near-arbitrary offsets.
Free Beautiful JavaScript Menus made Really Easy, Free License giveaway
Visual PC Hardware Identification Guide
The debate you're referring to is whether this is exploitable if you block Javascript with NoScript. Most of us don't.
That's a good point. Quick and thorough response that if not for reading the content looked incredibly like the original. Not difficult to do "technically", but then, I didn't do it so who am I to talk?

That said, a properly placed profanity can add a punch and shock the reader ... that effect is lost when profanity is in virtually every sentence ... and shit.
A good friend of mine is working on his masters in GIS right now.

I was talking to him about climate models the other day (he works with climatologists) and he said something along the lines of "fucking climatologists, dude. Tell me what the temperature is going to be tomorrow, or in a week, THEN we'll work on what it is going to be is 40 years".

I'm not saying that he is right or wrong, but I do really feel (feelings != science, I know) that if they (the climatologists) could give us some more accurate predictions of what they weather is going to be next month, I would have less trouble listening to them when they try to tell me what it is going to be in 30 years.
Crude, sophomoric, but mostly just an irritating video.
There are apparently a bunch more of these coming in a week and a half, when Dowd and co. take the stage at Black Hat.
Articles linked should be better than the average HN comment. This one was noise, not signal.
For what it's worth, this would've not worked on me if there were some uber-useful service that would've not wanted to pay for.

I would simply put IP and email-based duplicity checks in place and would leave existing multiple accounts alone. This should work just fine.
in general, simplify.

my 2 cents. take or leave:

* severely cut down the copy up top. e.g.:
Athenian Marble has specialized in cultured marble since 1969. We have 50 employees in a 67,000 sq ft facility to serve your needs!

* add the A+ BBB rating as a very simple graphic--instant credibility (even I know what that is!)

* 3 calls to action below:

1) Call (phone number only)

2) Visit (address only; map seems extraneous; maybe include the photo form the "About us" with the building facade so people can find it easily when they drive there)

3) Email (deprioritize this--I assume most people pick up the phone for info on marble; maybe even get rid of the form and just have an email address)

I would refrain from using phrases like "Are You Ready?" and "Let us help you." In particular, "Are You Ready" could turn off someone who's just looking for info.

BTW, the "see all photos" page should feature photos more prominently. It has a ton of text up top. I imagine photos are very important for engaging customers.
A) Stop being such affected crypto-wankers, and realize that they don't need more entropy than the TCP stack.

B) Given that (A) is basically untenable for them, find entropy by looking at the user's Mozilla profile.

It's bizarre that they're looking in IE's messy cache directory when they have their own tidy one that they fully control! There's all kinds of lovely compact entropy to be found there, especially with the SQLite databases that it keeps.
On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore
(http://bit.ly/11KMaT Amazon).

Commodore has been kind of ignored in computing history, but they were the first company to sell 1 million units. This book has a lot of big characters in it, including the ruthless, cigar chomping, Jack Tramiel.

I'm biased though, as I cut my teeth on a C64.
> A few thousand out of 133,000 isn't a huge percentage.

Also, how many of those multiple accounts are actually using all of their accounts ? I can easily imagine people creating second account after they played around with the service using a throw-away account, and then actually liked it enough to create a 'real' account.
feel free to email me and I can help you out with any CSS stuff... darrindemchuk @ gmail.com
I know the guideline is for comments. I'm not interpreting it legalistically, I'm interpreting its intent: to shape the culture of the site.
are you saying that gay marriages that took place in california should be annulled now that the law prohibits them?
Thank you very much I will - be A/b testing your exact idea (as far as I can get from the text) with google site optimizer thanks a lot that is great feedback :)
Free electricity!
This is SO ridiculous ! Just another one of Stallman's obsessive rants. He just can't accept that his beloved FSF/FOSS community wants to use something created by MSFT. If MSFT did the things this article suggests, and even worked with FSF on 'getting it right', FSF/Stallman would STILL find something wrong with the Community Promise for C# and STILL deem it 'dangerous and wrong to use on GNU/Linux'. Stallman, just accept it, get over it, and move on man...people like C#, and Mono is a damn good implementation of it. Chill out!
A subscription pay wall would give the most noticeable drop in duplicate accounts. As long as your service is free and account creation is simple (which it should be), you'll get duplicates if there's incentive to do so.

Things you can check if you want to prevent dupes: (But be aware that some of these can and do target legit users)

- IP checks
- Browser Cookies (if same value for multiple users)
- Flash Cookies (same principle)
- E-mail
- System-specific metrics (if you're running native code)
Thanks. That's what I was looking for. The write-up didn't indicate what was vulnerable...I had to look at the PoC code.

I'd bet most of this community uses NoScript. My wife and family do not. I don't bother installing it on their systems because my experience has been that they simply whitelist everything that "doesn't work".

There's no point to installing NoScript on Firefox used by someone who whitelists a site he clicked on from a spam message because there was an appropriately placed breast, or claims of such of the appropriate size.
Will I get downvoted if I'll point out that you can see in the picture here: http://www.microspotting.com/about
that she isn't even that hot?

In my opinion, if you can't resist the temptation to click that link, you lose your right to downvote it.
i have tris (the tetris game that got pulled because of rights issues) and it still works like it did back in OS1.0.
Agreed. It's a shame what they did to this potentially interesting dataset. I can hardly imagine a worse way to plot it.

They should just release a TSV with the raw data, then someone with a clue can bake some real graphs.
PWN last.fm
I find this objection lame. Satire isn't supposed to be civil. It isn't supposed to be non-misogynist or non-homophobic either. It's supposed to be fucking ruthless. It's supposed to speak the unspoken truth about something, irrespective of decorum.

Obviously not every shot is going to hit the mark, and the ones that miss often seem rude, crude, or both. But when satire hits the bullseye it transcends all of those categories because of the power of truth-telling. It has been a valuable part of civil discourse, in the larger sense, for as long as civil discourse has existed.

As for this particular attempt at satire, I think it hit the target in a few places (in terms of nailing what's going on behind the original propaganda), and the rest of it reads like pretty much every other Zed Shaw blog post. So, not completely successful, but not too bad for an instant knockoff. And the original piece was so asking for it (did you read her t-shirt?) It would be interesting if other parodies pop up.
The Making Of An Online Business – The Series
If I recall, AIX is one system which always returns 0 if NULL is dereferenced - the word at address 0 is guaranteed to a) be addressable, and b) contain a 0. These days I guess it's a security vulnerability, but the original intention was to allow wizards to optimize away the need for certain null checks. IBM actually has a number of patents related to techniques such as array boundary checking under this system.
Well, I downvoted you for making her looks an HN issue. That wasn't the point I was trying to make. I'm sure she's attractive and talented and a bunch of other things besides, and the whole interview is probably entirely honest. But she's playing a role in a script that someone else wrote.
And unless government regulations unduly restrict space travel. I don't know why they would, given that it's essentially just like airplanes, yet much higher.
Displaying a realtime map of website visitors
I don't do real life
You'd think /usr/bin/env would always work, but I've seen this break in production systems where /usr/bin/env is not in the $PATH in situations like cron scripts. It's retarded I know but it does happen.
But she's playing a role in a script that someone else wrote.

There are many people here interested in entrepreneurship, and part of entrepreneurship is creating a certain image about yourself. The way I read your comment, is that you are criticizing the fact that she is playing a role. How many people here who have started a company are very careful about the image you're creating for your company? Microsoft is no different.
One instance of this "power struggle" was posted here 8 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350332
Yeah, that doesn't really work for someone just coming out of college next year, with no experience, unfortunately.
This Isn't a Recession, It's a Collapse
The real question is, how do you know they are using multiple accounts unless you are invading their privacy and looking at their private data stored on your servers?
With No Notice, Twitter Adds More Limits - Password Trouble Ensues
Kind of scared to do this, because the last time I admitted to not knowing an acronym I got -8, but what is PoC?

EDIT: Oh, just figured it out reading a new comment. PoC = proof of concept, for anyone else who may not be running full-speed on a Saturday.
I think the logic is they are getting millions of college students to use the core applications of Chrome OS and that will provide leverage at some point. A bit far fetched, but I suppose having the next generation grow up using your platform is a good thing for when you try and convince them to use your OS.
We all play roles. It's a fundamental part of human interaction. I think the gripe here is that the role is externally and structurally imposed rather than internally motivated.
Ask HN: Helpful software for writing a novel?
I have been working on a fiction novel for the last year or so as a hobby.

I've found it difficult to locate good software for keeping track of characters, plot/subplots and have settled on a handful of 11x17 in. pages of white paper with a lot of circles and lines. I am getting toward the end and I'm finding I spend more time deciphering my scribbling, returning to prior pages, and researching my own work than I do actually writing.

I've tried FreeMind, but it just isn't flexible enough. With Dia/Visio, I find I'm bending those applications to do things the authors didn't intend.

I also haven't found a great word processor for writing novels and am actually using Notepad++ because its barron, plain text that I know I can paste that into something else later to get pagination/TOC worked out.

I don't care if it's OSS, free beer or for pay if it can reduce distractions during those critical times when creativity is at its peak.

For writers (published or hobbiest), what software has been the most productive for managing the elements of a complex novel?
It makes so much sense now.

After all, who hasn't wondered whether IE wasn't written by an errant gas station attendant who just wandered into the MSFT offices to use the bathroom?