skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good, except that you still have to deal with authentication, authorization, and other security aspects of a server-side component. Server-side code won't go away no matter how fat the client gets.
That's not true. The article says that it's the three to six YEAR olds who are making value judgements, not the 6 MONTH old babies. The headline is making a more dramatic point than is supported by the article by conflating all ages. From the article:

How do researchers test a 6-month-old? They show babies photographs of faces. Katz found that babies will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from their parents, indicating they find the face out of the ordinary. Race itself has no ethnic meaning per se—but children's brains are noticing skin-color differences and trying to understand their meaning.

When the kids turned 3, Katz showed them photographs of other children and asked them to choose whom they'd like to have as friends. Of the white children, 86 percent picked children of their own race.
…Windows, the most awkward of all operating system user interfaces in the world…

JCL?
How to get near Real-Time search results from Google
Honest question: How would one go about implementing authentication/security into such a setup? Maybe it could work for 1-writer, many reader apps (blogs) but how do you handle user signups, accounts, and security with this?
LBSN Centrl Adds First Real-Time Location-Based Messaging System
The DREAM Act is the legislation that would help. people like me.

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

http://dreamact.info/

We need your support in pressuring legislators to action.
If you're on a Mac, check out Freedom: http://macfreedom.com/

It does exactly what you want. I think I first heard about it on a HN thread a while ago...
Subtle point: we already have an algorithm that would sovle NP-complete problems in P time if P=NP; it's just that we don't have a proof that it works that way. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_%3D_NP_problem#Polynomial-tim...
The terminology is confusing. The property named "prototype" on the constructor is not necessarily the same as the actual prototype object of an instance created with the constructor. There is no standard way to retrieve the prototype object of an instance, but in Mozilla you can get through the non-standard '__proto__' property.

The 'prototype' property on the constructor indicates what will be assigned as the prototype of instances created in the future with that constructor. The property can be changed, but that does not affect existing instances created with the constuctor. It would probably be less confusing if the 'prototype' property was called 'assignPrototype' or something like that.

The prototype (ie. __proto__ property) of an instance cannot be changed according to the standards (although some non-standard implementations allow that). That is, it cannot be changed to point to a different object, but the prototype object itself is mutable, and when you change it it will affect all instances sharing the prototype.

It is not uncommon to think of constructors as equivalent to classes, however technically prototypes and constructors are independent. You can create instances with different prototypes from the same constructor, and you can create instances with the same prototype from different constructors.
Isn't IE 6 still around because many companies still standardize on it for their intranets? I would think the answer is Yes as evidenced by MSFT's recent life extension to 2014.
I didn't have any problem opening it Safari. ;)

Edit: I just tried it in Firefox 3.5.2 and no problem either.

I'm running Mac OS X Snow Leopard on a Macbook 2ghz duo, 2gb ram.

Possibilities: It could be Firefox 3.0, try updating. Or it might be the 64 bit power of Snow Leopard that makes it faster for me. But then again Firefox is still a 32 bit application.
Problem with Freedom is I have to manually activate it. I never do.
This is what a corporation looks like...
What a useful cheatsheet! Its just too bad that it is so useful. IE6 should have died long ago, forever replaced by Firefox.
Google Sitebricks
Doesn't this undermine the last advert with Kylie? I thought she'd actually done the stuff in that one, but in this one it's clearly not her work. Are we supposed to re-think our impressions of the first one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhre2C4THT4
FanGamb: Gamble + Fantasy Football
Promo video looks fantastic, who made it?
As part of a corporate job, I was put through some training that emphasized understanding different personality and communication types, in order to better understand and interact with that variety in coworkers and clients.

Unfortunately, the training did not transfer to the broad corporate policy, which kept squeezing people closer together, lowering or eliminating cube walls -- moving to something approaching open space -- and insisting everyone multi-task both workload and their physical environment, tuning out a plethora of surrounding activity -- including your cubette (only two low walls per seat) partner's meetings three feet away from you.

In other words, the extroverted (often "management" types; though introverts can make good managers under other circumstances) dominated. Other personality types suffered. Those with enough seniority and clout took to working from home.

The lesson: If you match the description on this list, don't expect such treatment from the general population. Work to put yourself in a position where they have no choice. That can be a very difficult lesson for an introvert: Valuing yourself in a disparaging world, and putting yourself first before that world drains you.

Many introverts have a strong need for social connection. Often we subsume ourselves in an attempt to create and maintain it. This eventually makes everyone very unhappy. Turning the list into a list of things that you do for yourself -- that you insist upon -- is a better approach. Then follow up with the people who respect this.

This doesn't rule out extroverts. Some get it. Others learn. Especially when they find out their normal approach gets them nowhere.
In all honesty, everyone in corporate IT knew damn well that iPhones did not support hardware encryption until the 3GS. Why do you think Schiller made such a big deal out of it during the keynote ("The #1 request from business users has been hardware encryption..." or something like that)?

This is yet one more in a string of under-researched, hysterical articles from InfoWorld that are making that magazine the tech equivalent of US! Weekly.
Telecom operators get the scoop on Hadoop
Why does the article present this as some kind of news? We've known of Haast's eagle for years and it's connection to the Maori legend is common knowledge among anyone who's heard of the bird.

(Still cool though.)
The Strange Story of Napoleon's Wallpaper
Let me put it like this: Microsoft is only supporting (issuing security updates to, etc) IE6 because it was shipped with XP and Microsoft is still supporting XP. XP can't enter into the legacy version phase due to the large number of customers refusing to upgrade. If Microsoft could phase out XP, it could phase out IE6 as well. If Microsoft phased out IE6, companies would be forced to phase out IE6 as well. Hence, everyone who's refusing to upgrade to Vista (or Windows 7 soon) is helping keeping IE6 alive.
Ah, so actually it is just the httpclient that causes all this. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a version of that lib that uses some local authentication method though.
I set my editor to highlight my parens not de-emphasize so I can get a better picture of the structure of my code at a glance.
I think CouchDB might have built-in authentication coming soon, but I'm not sure about that.

There's always the option of using HTTP authentication.
Yes, history keeps repeating. It's hilarious to watch these kids reinvent, well, everything, over and over.

So, here we have the return of the fat client, episode 20.

And as with all the other episodes the standard question remains: If you're going fat-client then why on earth stick to a platform as horrible as HTML/JS?
If you've spent 2 years amassing 2000 real world sample inputs, I think this is a very valid way of going that extra bit further to test your system. Of course it's not possible to capture every possible test case when generating random input but using Markov chains seems like a good way to get 'sensible' data out of a random process. It is likely they exposed bugs in their parser that they would never have found by loading in real world make files.
Surely you could use ad-hoc beta for feeback loop?
It is a cool hack and very innovative. However, I think that this lego 3d scanner is much better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxm0aThDJHI&feature=playe...

Of course it is just as fast, or rather, just as slow. More info on the scanner at:

http://philohome.com/scan3d/scan3d.htm
FYI, I believe the author was born in and grew up in Japan and has now lived in the US for many years. Some of his other essays point out differences between Japanese culture and American culture.

I agree with you though. I have lived in China and found possibly more specialization there as parents usually set the course for their children which most children feel obligated to follow. Whereas in the "West" parents generally leave things open to their children to decide.

When I first read the article, I found this part the most interesting:

"I remember reading about how good The Rolling Stones were in self-promotion. Someone in the article said that nobody becomes that successful by sheer luck. I tend to agree.... When we raise children with this bias towards specialization, they become defenseless when they enter the real world. They naively and faithfully keep improving their skills in their own specialized areas thinking that the success will automatically follow."

Jeff Atwood had an article where he mentioned that if he could train every developer on some skill it wouldn't be technical as most decent developers are already good with technical things. He would train them how to market and promote themselves since most developers just focus on programming and ignore the other skills needed to become successful.
Source code is in fact not the end result.

If it were, we wouldn't care so much about non-functional aspects, like spacing, variable and method naming, and code organization. It's a design document. It's special, though, because it is the only design document that the computer can, after processing, understand.

The end result is not the code. It's what happens on people's screens, and in people's worlds after we tell the computer what to do.
'How I tweeted my way out of spinal surgery'
The insight in this post is very useful, however totally unrelated to the title. Its a MySQL character set insight.
I've done this with Ruby and set the color to light gray. My co-workers wanted to have C/Java-style parens around damn near everything (except when they didn't; the reasoning to omit them was something along the lines of, "But, see, here it's a DSL." )

They strike me as line noise and make it harder to read many things, so I lightened up the color in my vim syntax files to give the appearance of more white space.

I had mixed results. Yes, it was far more readable to me, but there were times when a paren was missing or mistakenly added, or the spacing was off (another coding standard violation), and so on.

Now that I code on my own, the new coding standards say no parens unless required by the language. I also changed my syntax coloring back to more clearly show parens.
The story of the financial crisis, from one of the people who predicted it
…Windows, the most awkward of all operating system user interfaces in the world…

Honestly I don't find Windows 7 awkward at all, on the contrary it feels very streamlined and quite a pleasure to use. Previous versions of windows I could see this applying to, but not 7.

OSX has a lot of 'awkward' to it as well, finder can be very frustrating to use to name one.
Recession hasn't slowed global Internet traffic
Why low-fidelity prototyping kicks butt for customer-driven design
The reasons to stick with DHTML/JS as a "thick client" development platform are simple: decent, free development tools, the ability to interpose proxies and application middleware between the client and server transparently, and a very, very large install base for the client runtime.

That being said, I share much of your amusement at/disdain for the attitude of "OMG, look at this brand new thing I have made that is completely different from all those old things!"
I agree with Blasdel. Think about MP3 players back then and how awful the song management software was. They were afterthoughts and it showed.

The bad experience dealing with those programs negated any benefit from HAVING an MP3 player. I remember messing with my Nike/PSA's player and trying to load my songs onto it, and I simply gave up.

Apple figured out that iTunes needed to be as easy to use as the iPod. That was their win.
Faantastic. Thanks for that link; I had never read this.
That's pretty awesome, thanks for sharing.
I was expecting some kind of PHP bullshit about replacing quotes.

The article turned out to be actually good. Cheers.
Sinatra has built in handlers to render erb, haml, builder, and sass. Layouts are handled by automatically grabbing the file layout.erb (or layout.haml, etc). Partials are a bit of a pain, since you have to write your own helper, but at it's core, you're just calling the same erb helper, but with :layout => false.

It's downright trivial to add your own rendering helper for any templating language.

And for organization purposes, it's really freeform. Act like you're writing any other ruby app, and organize how you like. If it's small, a single file makes sense, if it's medium sized, maybe a file for controller and one for models, for big, do the split into an app/{routes,models,views}. All of that is easily supported.

Check out Monk as a good example of how Sinatra can be adapted to a more complex directory structure.

(also, Hi James!).
What I Learned From My Failed Startup
Why the downvotes? It's a superficial glance at SQL injection fixes with little explanation or education. Just like you can't put a novel in a comic-strip, you can't explain SQL injection security with a single block of code.
twisted does it by using deferToThread (so the call sits in a thread pool and the reactor doesn't block).

I suppose they just need their twisted loop clone thing to implement deferToThread now.
DuckTyping in Java
Heated debates amongst programmers (coworkers) about marginally important questions such as indenting styles, parenthesis usage, naming conventions, source code directory structure, etc. are always very amusing to observe. I usually sit back and just watch the show.
Second Google UFO Logo
I actually liked the ads with Seinfeld(who isn't really washed out if you consider his earning power), is that weird?

You have to consider the image Microsoft has to repair here, at least they're moving in the right direction, and I'd rather them focus on their products and .NET framework than purely advertising first anyway. While the ads are not making me want to run out and buy Windows 7 right now, using the release build absolutely solidifies the fact that I will purchase a copy, it's really a pleasure to use, which says a lot about how far they've come since Vista/XP.
The analogy begins :

You have just come from your annual medical checkup, where your doctor assures you that you are in robust health.

Walking jauntily down the street, you bump into a practitioner of alternative medicine. He takes one look at you and declares “You have a serious tumour! It must be removed or you will die”.

You ignore him as you always have, and continue your merry way down the street. One day later, a stabbing pain suddenly cripples you, and you collapse to the pavement.
Comment System with jQuery, Ajax and PHP (Version 2.0)
Bing 2.0: "Super Imressive" [sic]
There are state level DREAM Act legislations that offer a path to college for undocumented students, but no path to legalization. If I recall correctly there are currently 10 states that have some form of such legislation: California, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Texas, Utah, Washington, and since this past Spring, Wisconsin. These states have urged action on the federal level, as this is the only thing that would really solve the problem.

That, working my ass off, working my ass off some more, and a whole lot of help from people who care about me, to whom I am in debt for the rest of my life. I know too many who are not as lucky as me and it tears me apart to see their dreams shattered for no sensible reason and no wrongdoing of their own.

NYC is a better place for undocumented immigrants because you can rely on the police to help you, they are legally prevented from inquiring about your immigration status. On the other hand, we have stories of valedictorians being thrown into jail and put into deportation proceedings for rolling a stop sign in places like Texas (some people were able to get driver licenses a while back, in some states, no longer possible).
You shouldn't really be including hacks straight into your main css. The main reason being that you have no idea how future browsers will handle the hack because is basically undocumented, and this might cause you - or your client - grief in the future.

Include a new stylesheet via conditional comments and you can isolate any IE browser while not needing any hacks. (i.e., you can just declare the background color directly)
Understanding Idioms Requires Both Sides Of The Brain
I'm excited about Windows 7. I just wish there were better ads.

The Seinfeld ads weren't hideous, but I can't imagine Crispin thought it would give Microsoft a better name. And Seinfeld's washed out after Bee Movie. My ad prof suggested yesterday that the ads might have made more sense with a guy like Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert.
Weird, I get redirected to http://www.sinatrarb.com on safari but not FF. Why would that be?
I prefer the original headline:
"It’s Hard Being a Bear (Part Four): Good Economic Theory"
At this point I'd be willing to live with "...forever replaced by IE8".
Surely this is exactly what a child would do. Childish images, childish fonts, childish music. Marshmallow cat is fluffy. Words above her grade level...like 'snappy...and reponkusive!' I recall cutting out pictures and cartoons from newspapers and magazines and pasting them together to make little presenations (about the then-recession, believe it or not) in order to impress my Dad at about the same age...I didn't understand it especially, but I knew he was interested in it so decided to help him out.

Frankly, this is exactly the sort of thing I expect to be helping a young Ada Browl with in 5-6 years time. [fanboy] On a PC.[/fanboy]

Clearly, the only response open to Apple at this point is an endorsement deal with Boxxy.
Modern standards compliant browsers are usually cross-platform so HTML is the new GUI toolkit, scripted by JS. Especially with WebGL and O3D in the works we will see the browser become the delivery mechanism for the new-old-school fat client. The difference between the new and old is network awareness. New style apps are often mashups.

Programs are temporarily installed for a session by visiting a specific URL (Chrome's app shortcut even makes it seem like a real installation). You update to new versions by refreshing the page.

Old school, new school, like it or not, this is the foreseeable future.
Android-based SMB vulnerability check
Ask HN:Can a CS guy survive in electronics work?
I was a long time Computer science fan. At the age of 14 I started with programming in C and quickly graduated to socket programming and experimenting with other languages like Ruby. But before I joined college I attended a seminar on basic electronics and liked it a lot. I changed my plans of majoring in CS and went for a electronics degree instead.

After some time I suddenly started to wonder if I made a wrong choice. First of all is that in my college in an electronics degree they focus mainly(and rightly) on circuit designing and micro controller design and management. To be honest I miss courses like algorithms and theory of computation. But on the other hand I feel much much re leaved that I dont have to study in the more proprietary software they use, like for GUI programming they just emphasis on microsoft windows and for object oriented programming they limit themselves to whatever is included in java only. Also there are no "interesting (as i want)" stuff like a course on functional programming.

Fortunately in my electronics course they have interesting things like AI and image processing (and electives for bio informatics).

So would it be too hard to survive in a world without algorithms and data structures for a CS guy?
This will become a classic like theyrule.net
I'm a computer bisexual -- I use a Mac at home and a PC at work

-- I have a request to make to bloggers and journalists: please don't use this analogy unless you are in fact screwing your computers as it makes it difficult for me to take you seriously. "OS agnostic," has been around for a while and is clearer.

It's especially annoying as he has a real point to make and the most noticeable thing about the article is what looks like a ribald joke.
looks interesting. Do you use it?
According to new study, global warming is affecting beer production (Saaz Hops)
Because safari automatically tries www.domain.ext if domain.ext fails?
Knownhost Coupon Code Knownhost Review on VPS Hosting
http://urchin.earth.li/~twic/twic.py

excellent. and great comment:
"""This is Tom's personal Python subroutine library. You are not expected to understand this.

Warning: this file contains HIGH MAGIC and DEEP VOODOO, as well as quite a bit of QUESTIONABLE CODE and very few COMMENTS. Use with caution.

ha!
i've only been in nyc for 7 years now, so i can't compare it to anything before then, but things don't seem quite as dire as the article suggests. sure, i've got friends looking for work but many of them were looking for work before the real estate bust. brooklyn, especially, seems to be growing pretty rapidly still. partly, i'm sure, because it's slightly cheaper than the island - but less so each day. that said - there have been a lot more condos in increasingly unlikely neighborhoods over the past couple years - it's quite possible that as those mortgages come due, a housing glut will drive down housing prices/change the neighborhoods landscape more radically. for now, though, these condos are still holding out for people to lease / not open to renters. beyond real estate, those of my friends who have started small businesses in the last year are having a great time of it so far/expanding a lot faster than expected.
She pieced together a presentation using quotes from the articles raving about Windows 7. No, a child would never do that.
I wonder if this is why certain idioms are considered "stronger" or "more vivid" than saying the same thing directly. Since these idioms take advantage of the right-brain, which is also responsible for emotion etc., it seems reasonable to me that the emotional connotations of a particular idiom are directly activated instead of thru a translation layer (language centers of the left brain).
This is definitely not an earth shattering message and most certainly nothing that we have not intuitively known based on our prior life experiences. But what is profound about this post is that your perspective is different today, then when you first had this thought or read something like this in the past. Our perspectives change in second, which enables us to have a different interpretation of the same experience regardless of the amount of time since the initial occurrence took place. These are the types of messages that need to echo, loud and clear, because their underlying meaning could never be heard enough...

The quote by Niccolò Machiavelli is incredible!
SecurityTube, a YouTube for hacks
rescuetime does this.