skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But can't you do the mapping for every service? Even Posterous lets you do that - for free.
It's been an interesting 6 years. Many attacks we protect against now (XSRF, most types of XSS) were basically unknown then. Some (cryptographic splicing) were popularized by researchers auditing WordPress. A mixed blessing of being popular is that everyone is looking at your code. However we try to turn around fixes as quickly as humanly possible, and with few exceptions (Scoble not upgrading) high profile WordPress blogs (CNN, NY Times) have never had any security problems.
I gave up on shared hosting a couple of years ago. Switched to a VPS and couldn't be happier.

* better security (hundreds of random customers can't write a PHP script to read my db config settings)

* better uptime (if one of those hundreds (thousands?) of websites gets slammed with traffic, my sites don't go down.)

* i can run as many websites as I want - same price

* it's handy to use ssh/rsync as a dropbox for distributing large files

* I get my own IP address, so if one of those hundred other customers sends spam or is hacked, my IP address isn't blacklisted.
WP.com, to my knowledge, has never had a code or security breach.

There are communities (like Club Penguin) where they are quite promiscuous with their passwords and share login details with each other regularly, and then "hack" each others blogs.
Yes, but such a policy should be in place before you start using open source code, by the time you wonder about giving back to the community these should be passed stations. After all, using open source code also comes with strings attached, not in the least what you will be able to do with the code that you produce. If you find out - as a manager - that one of your employees has tainted a bunch of code by importing open source software in to the company repository and modifying it extensively then you have a problem just the same.

A policy is made before the work starts, not at the time you think you may want to open source something (though that probably will happen plenty of times). It's a great way to be confronted with the need for such a policy though.

To use the fact that you need approval from legal as a reason to forego open sourcing anything is nonsense.

You need approval from legal for any kind of action that you do on behalf of the company you work for that interacts with the outside world, including opening up source code.

If only to make sure you do not inadvertently expose the company to a liability or give your competitors access to the software that gives you an edge.

Nobody ever suggested that would be a good idea.

Even google doesn't do that, ask them to release their GFS implementation and we'll see what comes back.
That's not the issue here -- the worm doesn't require any files to be writable.
You should check out "child theme" functionality, which allows you to make lazy changes to the style without modifying any core files, which is highly recommended against.
This is fantastic advice -- for many WP blogs I manage I just have them svn update on a cron job nightly.
Cell Phone Cost Calculator Killed In Canada
I'll be getting final details out this week, but there is going to be a mini-NoSQL event in NY October 5, in Chelsea.
Huh? He knows perfectly well what the definition of "metadata" is. It's not that hard a concept. Nor is it hard to see why it's muddled, or why systems that make an architectural distinction between the two (data and metadata) are clumsy and rigid. In fact, the whole point is rather obvious (or ought to be), but he makes up for it by offering specific insights. I thought the historical speculation was particularly good.
Ask HN: How many "layers" do we go though using a browser?
Was just randomly thinking earlier about how computers are basically built up though layers until it hits machine code. So here's one for you...

How many "layers" (don't know how else to describe it) does the computer go through to hit binary?

Browser < ... < ... binary ?
Analysis is the mother of invention
There are lots of good articles out there on font choices for the web and this seems to be a reasonable, if cursory, introduction. I personally dont care for either Times and prefer Georgia for a serif typeface that works for both monitors and print. Verdana is a good choice for headings.

If you havent thought about fonts, I recommend spending an afternoon googling around. There are lots of good articles. Font selection is one of he areas where a lot of web developers fall down, usually by using too many or ones with poor readability.
Of course, Stephenson also slyly suggested that the ideal remote-teacher-to-remote-student ratio remains one to one: Miranda sacrificed her career to raise Nell, remotely.

If you still need a human teacher, and that teacher has to be paid, what exactly have you gained by interposing the Kindle between the teacher and the student?

Greenspun once theorized that you could pay teachers in low-wage countries to do the tutoring, but I have trouble believing this will work. Communicating over a teleconference link is hard to do, even when there are adult-aged engineering graduates on both ends of the link. Show me the person from a low-wage country whose flawless command of English and uncanny ability to communicate over the phone allows them to effectively teach eight-year-olds from half a world away... and I'll show you someone who won't keep a low-wage job for long, because someone is going to offer them a high-wage job.
Opera gives a Fraud Warning on that URL.
What great advances is this approach throwing out?

Most bloggers have a very simple use case: publish stuff that looks nice, generates an RSS feed, and maybe allows a comment thread. Most bloggers are not, and have no interest in becoming, sysadmins or DBAs.

My contention is that it is easy to set things up so you can blog with whatever app you want without leaving your data at the mercy of the next person to find an exploit.
Well, she's a fiction writer. Me shrugs.
A meta-distinction.
mt_rand isn't crypto-safe either. You need to be using the system's secure random number generator, or OpenSSL's.
All I'm saying that while it is indeed true that having a seed implies a deterministic behaviour, this should be an implementation detail that should not be exposed to the the users of the interface.
Thank you. I love posterous.
Unless you check up on your blog several times a day --- and most people don't even check up on their blog several times a week --- it doesn't matter how streamlined WordPress has made its upgrade process.
You're probably right, but if Wordpress checked out "automatically branching a child theme every time I use the interface Wordpress itself provides me with to modify core files" functionality, it would be more usable.
That's a pretty fatalistic argument. I think meritocracy has merit and I don't want it to self destruct. That's why, like other principles, this one needs exceptions as too.

Set theory is very useful but it needs an exception to survive Russel's paradox. You can't let useful things become useless just to uphold some moral rule.
Isn't that technically 'i' technically owned by apple as a trademark?
Ikea Catalog's Move to the Verdana Font Angers Fans of Futura
Club Vs. LoJack (Old Dive into mark post on security)
At an architectural level, I think that’s entirely wrong.

In my applications, I've encountered the opposite. On an architecture level data is usually stored in a relational database, where the nodes of the indexes' B-trees are optimized in size for the disk and processor cache, foreign keys are defined and enforced, and transactions ensure consistency. Meta-data, on the other hand, is significantly more dynamic (the structure changes as an application evolves) and several orders of magnitude smaller in size (hence, no need for indexes), and hence better stored in XML, Yaml, or JSON. I've certainly seen people confusing the two - usually by creating a ton of structured DB tables which should be replaced with a config file.

The fundamental difference I see is this: Data should be optimized for scale. It needs to be well-structured, so your architecture can use that structure to scale well as the amount of data increases. Meta-data should be optimized for change, so the structure can change as your application evolves. Now, there's a lot of ways to structure data, so there's certainly a lot of choices in how (and how much) you want to structure your data, but the trade-off is real - you either spend time defining/maintaining structure to optimize performance, or you ignore performance and structure for the sake of change/development speed.

It's really the same question as with type systems in programming languages - type definitions are meta-data about code which lets compilers/interpreters optimize performance, at the expense of a developer having to write and maintain type definitions.

That said, I agree that for applications which don't require exceptional efficiency, there's a lot to be gained by unifying all data at one point in the structured/unstructured spectrum. But this doesn't mean the spectrum ceases to exist.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802230
I use vcprompt, it works with all the major ones, and is written in C to be fast: http://vc.gerg.ca/hg/vcprompt/
There's still a Technorati?
From one point of view it's all binary, but here are the layers of one project that I worked on (and this is the simplified version):

Browser > javascript > client library > jQuery > apache > Jboss > Spring > Tomcat> controller logic > business logic > Hibernate > cache> database > jsp > libraries
I wonder if anyone has written an extension to allow:

/[0..255].[0..255].[0..255].[0..255]/

I'm guessing this could be compiled down to a regular regular expression. Support for [000..255] (enforce leading zeros) would be nice too.
Yes. Some applications want series of numbers that are pseudorandom, but completely reproducible, once you've provided the same seed. (See PHP's srand().)

This is often the case with simulations, or other algorithms that have a 'random' component that you'd still like to hold constant across (for example) related runs during testing or across distributed machines.

So there may be a sensible case for maintaining backward-compatible rand() behavior here, even though a better algorithm is available.
For trial projects, I host my own projects within my own network so that I have extremely fast speeds. When I publish them for beta-testing, I use kvchosting.com - they offer unlimited webspace and bandwidth for 2.99/month if you get the two year package.
Pot, kettle, etc.

A short reply so as not to strain your reading comprehension:

I've asked you to explain why you hold your premises and you haven't; you just continue reiterating that you hold them, and then point out that if I also held your beliefs I'd be in the wrong.

I get that. If you can't justify your own premises -- why the obvious differences between a ditch and knowledge don't matter -- there's not much more to discuss.
The situation - an entrenched oligopoly using government influence to continue screwing the whole country - really is intolerable, or barely tolerable, so it's possible that your project could attract a groundswell of support. There must be many people in Canada who grit their teeth forking out money to these overlords in what is supposedly a market economy. There are probably many who, like me, have cycled through the different providers in disgust, only to find that they're all worse than each other.

If you go through with this, I'll be interested to follow your progress. You should probably get set up to accept donations.
Uzbl: a browser that adheres to the Unix philosophy
Why is it up to the government to make something like this?

Choosing a phone/carrier/plan in Canada is a significant pain point. If a simple, comprehensive, and accurate tool like this existed, it would likely become quite popular (if one does exist, I want to know about it!)

The biggest challenge - other than design - is making sure the pricing data is complete and up to date. I'm not sure how the government project planned to deal with this - whether they expected the carriers to cooperate (hah!), or whether they were planning to hire people to maintain the data from publicly available sources.

Either way, with the right structure, this could be a great project to crowdsource. The only similar things I've seen use a blog or forum structure.
Nytimes Op-Ed College Advice Collection
Either I'm not following you, or you are not clear. Or both ;)

It is meant to work that way, for precisely the kind of reasons I outlined above.

Say you are writing a poker program. At the beginning of every game you seed the random number generator, you save the seed.

Halfway through a test you find a bug in the program.

You fix the bug (you think) and you make a test case for the fix.

You run the test case with the restored random seed to see if the bug is actually under control and does not influence any other part of the game up to there.

And so on.

That's clearly documented and very common use.

If it wouldn't be like that you'd have to play poker until the cows came home in the hope that one day that same sequence of play would occur.
Join the JSConf US and JSConf EU Discussion Groups
Join the JSConf US and JSConf EU discussion groups on Linked In to find out the latest and greatest from these two great JavaScript focused conferences.
And now, another thread about 3-d printing that is exactly the same as every other thread about 3-d printing.

Reprap can copy itself only not really.

Gee, imagine what this will mean for copyright.

Has anybody read the Diamond Age or Printcrime?! Wow, we're like, living in a sci-fi novel!

Great, now computers have reproductive organs. We're doomed.

Costs way to much to be useful. Should be so cheap I can leech a used one off someone else and hack it to perform better.

They don't actually print different materials, only plaster. Does nobody read?!

Sintering is soooo much better.

3-d Porn in 3, 2, 1...oh wait, it's already here.

> Thread complete.
> Print thread again? (Y/N)
These are some good points. Antonio, have you considered making software to allow people to upload their phone bills? One would need to think carefully about how to strip identifying data and demonstrate that you'd stripped it. But that seems like a soluble problem, especially in an open source context.

If you made it easy for me to upload my bill every month and made it transparent how the data was being scraped, I would totally do it. In fact, it would be a pleasure to make a small contribution to genuine competition.

The telcos would sooner or later try to thwart it, but that would draw attention to the whole endeavour.
JSConf US: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1799131
More Information: http://www.jsconf2009.com

JSConf EU: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2268822
More Information: http://jsconf.eu/
It shouldn't be up to the government. All getting government involved would do is create new opportunities for corporate corruption to hose up the whole mess. As long as this doesn't prevent any private efforts to do the same thing, the fact government has stopped moving forward on the matter is probably a blessing in disguise.
Something tells me I'd be able to tell it's not a real person in person.
Sure, basing the lines on the year of purchase is a bit random. Their one on eBay is much better:

http://www.meettheboss.com/ebay-acquisitions-and-investments...
I'm curious. Has anybody here released open-source code as part of a clear business strategy? Other than selling support and maintenance for it.
http://peepcode.com and http://www.screencastsonline.com both charge for what they call screencasts.

Arguably much of the content from http://www.lynda.com and other video training providers could also be called screencasts.
I don't understand one thing & I will really appreciate if someone can answer this for me. Suppose, I've made a PDF for my customers and PDF uses either Calibri or Gerogia then will these fonts be available on all platforms? I mean will customers be able to read the PDF that uses Calibri or Georgia on all OSs? Please enlighten me. Thanks.
How Much Does An iPhone User Spend On Apps? $80
>But I completely and totally disagree with your implication that more research will only marginal increase life spans

Unless the research is directed at curing aging, aging will always cause people to get more and more susceptible to disease as they get older.

>and that we can't find cures for yet undiscovered diseases.

What I was saying there was that you can't find a cure for a disease you haven't discovered yet. Do you disagree?

>And the asshole most likely to create a more easily transmissible HIV is mother nature.

There are six billion humans on Earth and the population is growing. All we need for disaster is one person who's intelligent, driven, and wants to destroy the human race. I agree that person would be very atypical. I disagree that we can be confident no one will ever fit that profile.
Ermm, 1. Your browser is almost certainly compiled C/C++/ObjC.
Here is a gist that's been thoroughly tweaked. It worked great for me: http://gist.github.com/177368.
> It's not a knee-jerk response.

How else would you describe a response that doesn't even take into account the possibility that one could avoid government regulation when there's apparently no solid proof that regulation is better than the lack of regulation? It sounds like a knee-jerk response to me.

Why don't you default to "We shouldn't spend a bunch of extra money on regulation when we don't have any reason to believe regulation will help, or even won't hurt!" instead? If you have some meaningful, reasonable explanation for that choice, I guess I might have been mistaken about the idea that it's a knee-jerk response, but you haven't shared any reasons so far, and there aren't any obvious explanations for why wasting resources on regulation that might just make things worse is better than avoiding that regulation.
> By that logic Ponzi schemes should be legal.

They should only be illegal to the extent that they involve fraudulent deception. Otherwise -- treat the "victims" like mentally competent adults capable of making their own life decisions.
That's a very interesting idea.

It sometimes feels like the Canadian version of the vi-vs-emacs debate is Bell-vs-Rogers - specifically, which one is more evil.

I would welcome any way to even the playing field a bit. If that involves sharing my bill - I'm happy to do it. I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one.
You shouldn't believe everything your browser tells you ;)
Except no one has been or is doing this. The government in Canada steps up in some places when there is insufficient private investment.
I use this browser. It's put together mainly by a bunch of Arch Linux users. It's little more than a thin wrapper around webkit providing pipes and things. It requires a lot of work to configure, (unless you copy the default) but it's very lightweight and integrates with some systems and styles of work better.

Edit: : A few more thoughts,

If you like the stuff that the suckless people (http://suckless.org/) put out, you will like uzbl. Otherwise it might be a bit of a culture shock. I still haven't been able to let completely go of firefox yet.
Internships can also teach someone who has never worked in a given industry before how a given company manages its operations. This not only provides a minimal "experience" benefit, and possibly a foot in the door for getting hired on at that employer as a regular employee, but also knowledge of how the business is run. In some cases, this might help inform an entrepreneurial effort so that a new competitor may arise under the former intern's direction -- a competitor that doesn't make the same mistakes the company offering internships made.

. . . but none of that matters, because someone might be stupid enough to tenaciously hold on to an internship long after it has ceased being beneficial to the intern, thus resulting in that person being "exploited".
The author kinda forgets that there's also branches of study that can't really be pursued from wherever you are but actually need facilities. Think of chemistry for example.
> programs can't be made to run faster, they can only be made to do less work.

That's one for the fortune file.
Webcams are really horrible though. If you're working with an eye to posterity you'd be better off using a few regular cameras, and people to operate them. Editing is a mixed bag. You could show the blackboard, but depending on what's up there you might be better off doing titling in software and having it float beside the lecturer.

Certainly you can do it for much less...$2000 was a ballpark price for doing something of pretty decent quality that's going to be visually engaging - the best lecturer in the world is a lot less compelling when s/he's been reduced to the size of a postcard or less. I think auto-editing would be next to useless except for the most basic things like:

while(wide_cam.frame.rightside.movement = true)
wait 10 seconds
edit_cut_to (medium_closeup.cam[1])
end while

It'd be a lot simpler to just hire a bunch of people and pay them to do the work - trying to automate what is essentially an aesthetic process is a recipe for wasting money. Bear in mind that you do get some economies of scale as you do more 'episodes'.

On the other hand, I do think there's a great startup opportunity here, mixing some basic production techniques with some visual FX techniques (let's animate that polynomial as the lecturer explains it to us) and some decent interactive controls (pause and rewind are sloppy relics of linear information access - what we want are the kind of contextual controls at which game UIs excel).
> Why is it up to the government to make something like this?

It isn't. But the idea that telcos lobby elected officials to stop such an initiative doesn't speak well for these companies nor our representatives.
Coding is a much different situation in many cases, specifically because of the availability of open source projects -- which serves the same purpose as an internship opportunity sometimes. Alas, there's no such thing as "open source development" in many industries.

Even for programmers, though, open source development doesn't do everything an internship can do. In fact, some people have a really difficult time getting started contributing to an open source project without some experience working closely with other coders to learn something about collaborative workflow and code review (for instance). The exception to that is cases where someone lucks into having a local mentor to help get them over the bar to entry for open source contributions -- knowledge of how to review others' code, figure out how to improve on it, and produce patches for submission to the project.
I think he was talking about a "rule" of dominant ethics or morality, and not the law, with that question.
That's what I'm aiming to do with MyPhoneBill.ca (assuming they don't release the source code, in which case it would just mean deploying it).
2,000 students at Washington State University report flu symptoms
Consumer information from the government is likely to be as accurate as the USDA Food Pyramid (aka "what to eat to keep the food industry healthy.") Lots of consumer protection groups thrive in the US without any government support except non-profit status. Check out this list (the link is .gov, but most of the organizations listed are private):

http://www.consumeraction.gov/resprt2.shtml

Without a doubt, each group has an agenda, so you have to be careful. Some are lefty, some are just industry fronts, and they all have an inevitable interest in increasing their own power and budget. But how is that any worse than the government? At least this way you aren't at the mercy of whatever power is temporarily in national ascendance. You can pick a group that reflects your own ideals. Maybe Canadian citizens should join Consumer's Union or a similar Canadian group and lobby them to produce the cell phone calculator with their own funds.
Hacking the Magical Number Seven With Storytelling