skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This article is very hard to follow in that the author will reverse position each paragraph, in one condemning Apple for releasing something that is not secure and in the next complaining when non-secure functionality is eliminated.

He's saying that Apple betrayed trust by implementing secure feature insecurely (while claiming that it was working correctly) and when they decided to actually do something about it, they just quietly pulled out the rug from under their users. There was no Apple announcement or apology. Just a checklist item burying deep in a list of changes in an OS update. That's why he says 'double betrayal.'
Congrats on the funding, Dani!
That is the easiest strategy, but the author doesn't mean it, and the entire collection of info backs that up. He even says so a few lines later:

"This isn't one of those rants about IE6 or a campaign to try to kill it. There are enough of those around the web, but they don't help if you need to support IE6 because it still has a significant enough marketshare that you can't ignore it for business reasons. No, this is the resource you've been hoping for."

But yes, I'd love not to support IE6 in all of my work, but that's just not happening...yet.
Do you know why Microsoft chooses to engage in open source?
The problem is that every few years a fad sweeps education whose substance is, "We need to teach (critical thinking, learning, etc), not facts." And then they try to teach that without teaching facts. And it doesn't work.

The reason it doesn't work is that learning a body of facts is a necessary prerequisite of learning to think. Obviously it isn't sufficient to learn facts, but it is necessary.

Now which facts you learn is somewhat arbitrary. For instance if you're reading something about history and it mentions a date in the early 1600s, it will be easier to gain perspective if you have some context for what was going on around then. It doesn't matter whether that context is the founding of Jamestown or the 30 years war, as long as you have some context.

For another example, I have absolutely no need to know that the lines, "'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark" is an allusion to the Garden of Eden. But the act of having figured it out, and then seeing how that original sin causes all of the others in Hamlet helped improve my thinking skills.

So yes critical thinking. Yes learning. However any attempt to teach those without also teaching a bunch of facts (most of which will be irrelevant to the future of most of your students) is bound to fail.
Oh cubicle farm. That's a depressing office:(
echo 'here''s your problem'' | {
apple
exchange
}

hmm
Apple never said their device supported on device encryption

Actually, their software made exactly that claim, and falsely, if I read the article correctly.
Please keep principal-agent-conflicts in mind.
Despite the author's claims to the contrary he's clearly biased (at least towards Apple's brand). He basically says he thinks every Ad that Microsoft has done sucks and every Ad that Apple has done is genius (which is a stretch on the most recent one). So is it a surprise he doesn't like this one?

Microsoft's goal in this Ad is to open people's eyes to the positive buzz Windows 7 has gotten. So they grabbed a cute, recognizable kid and basically had her do the intro because adorable catches people's attention. On that level I think it's a rousing success.
I've been using Sinatra for more than a year now. It's the perfect mini framework in Ruby. It helps you get web dev done, without ever getting in your way.

I've written a blog with lots of documentation at http://www.gittr.com.

In addition, coworkers of mine at Citrusbyte have taken Sinatra and built a minimal, yet more full featured web-stack called Monk (http://www.monkrb.com). Basically it takes the Sinatra library and wraps it up with convenient conventions, libraries for testing, settings files.

I've used Sinatra for small projects like Irclogger (http://www.irclogger.com) (http://www.github.com/cschneid/irclogger). You can take a look at the code and see how simple it is underneath. I've also used Sinatra for larger projects involving many files, user login and authentication, database access, and more.

What you'll find when you're writing Sinatra is that almost nothing is provided in the way of helpers, but also that you won't miss them. You write your own helpers where you want, and use normal rubygems to provide other functionality. It's not really a web framework's role to render JSON when there's a perfectly normal JSON gem that does it well. On the other hand, various people have recreated the small helpful stuff in reusable forms, including fairly simple things like partial rendering, up to reverse URL lookup (like Rails provides person_edit_path(), etc).

I'm not sure what the other commenter is talking about with bloated memory footprint for Sinatra, it's a fairly minimal piece of Ruby code, and any memory bloat will be the fault of your code, and not the framework itself. A hello world app in Sinatra takes about 10 megs of ram to get up and running (under Thin in my case). Rails takes about 40 last time I checked. Everything from there is related to your app (be careful with ActiveRecord, it'll chew through ram).

To sum up: Sinatra is a do it yourself framework toolkit. It doesn't provide much beyond making it easy to build your own helpers and your own application specific code. If you need help or advice, swing by #sinatra on freenode.org. People are always around to help.
Psst. Why is al3x.net loading an external gif every 20 seconds? It's distracting to see my browser indicate that it's loading something when I didn't interact with anything :)
the funniest part, more so than ineffective advertisements, is that that which got everyone's panties in a bunch was happiness. down with happiness! heh
If you don't know, other people don't know either, and that means you have a potential market of people.

Research is always hard. Nothing exists to tell you exactly what you want to know because your idea is to some degree unique, and the rule of unique is it can't be handled by blanket rule.

Hacker News exists as a sort of search engine, though, because you're utilizing a bunch of people to do your work for you. Reddit works the same way, and I take advantage of that a lot.
Or perhaps display a page from the Kama Sutra? That ought to keep it out of the App Store. :)
What? Do you really do this? It would drive me insane. Every 48 minutes you're interrupted by an alarm forcing you to stop what you're doing, get up, lose your train of thought, and then start over again?

Also, you can't reliably separate the work computer from the internet one if you want to search the web for help/resources. How do you manage that?
I'm not convinced that the ship that crashed was a good design. When GPS fails, it seems logical to switch to dead reckoning only if there is no human available to take over. If you've got a human crew available, it seems like a better choice to just stop the ship and let them handle it.
OK, so if your data model depends on multiple files for persistence, there's no transactional behavior?
Schneier on Security: Skein News
Best single IE6 CSS cheat for 90% of my problems:

zoom:1

Learn it, love it, use it.

It makes IE use its old renderer calculations (hasLayout) for whatever element you put it on, so it often fixes disappearing items, incorrect overflow, floats, padding/spacing etc. If your style looks correct in other browsers, give zoom:1 a shot on IE6 and see if it fixes things before wasting another minute.

ps. For those that are validation crazy, there are other triggers for hasLayout that will validate (certain padding, margins, etc.) but they vary from element to element, whether they have ancestors, etc. and you'll waste a great deal of time figuring them out.
That's correct. This is why most WSGI people (such as Graham Dumpleton, author of mod_wsgi) are opposed to adding any sort of async stuff to the WSGI spec as well.
I'm curious what issues you've run into with regards to memory footprint. I've not seen anything like that myself.
Haha .. finally .. Visual Brainfuck :)
This is SarahLacy writing. Isn't she the same who screwed up a public interview with Zuckerberg trying to hit on him?

No. This is not intended to be Ad-Hominem. I am just curious. Is she the one.
Yes, that was the point--cutting through the sleaze. Thanks for the pointers.
Spending hours or minutes working out yet another restriction on distractions instead of learning how to focus and concentrate properly? What good can this possibly ever do.
The "racy" subheading of the article (which was also used for the HN submission) was probably not written by the author of the article. The actual article does NOT say that children as 6 months "judge others" based on skin color. It DOES say that one study makes the rather banal observation that 6 month old babies can detect a difference between white skin and dark skin. As far as I can see, the article does not suggest that babies are making any sort of judgement about the person.
For those who haven't caught it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU
Apple's most recent ads are definitely pushing it, but they're working. They've taken every attack Microsoft has attempted and reversed it. They're starting to get really obnoxious, but that's because Microsoft got obnoxious first.

Are you saying Microsoft's ads didn't suck? First Bill Gates talked to a washed-out comedian about buying shoes. Then Microsoft launched an ad directly combatting an ad run by a competitor that has 8% market share, and the ad ignored the point of the original ad anyway (namely, that Mac and PC represent computers rather than actual users, and that PC users aren't likable-but-incompetent, PCs themselves are). Then they ran an ad that took Apple's claims of being a better computer and implicitly acknowledged it by focusing on how cheap Microsoft was, which—oops—backfired because in a recession, though people want cheaper computers they're more likely to make fewer quality purchases than many cheap ones.

This new ad wasn't nearly as bad, but what it is is generic. I don't watch that and get any feeling that Windows 7 is better than a Mac. In fact, as the author says, the stuff the kid's doing seems low-quality and bad. The kid could make better clipart on a Mac with stuff like instant alpha, an awesome feature that Apple doesn't use in ads because unlike its competitor Apple has a hundred different features it could use for offense. So it's not as bad as the older ads, which were negatively impacting Microsoft's image. Now it's back to being neutral and bland. But that's not good. It's just neutral.
What Great .NET Developers Ought To Know (.NET Interview Questions)
15 September 2009 – 20:45 CET: Chelsea – Porto Live Streaming
Champions League – Group D: Chelsea – Porto Live Streaming & Preview Are you a football fan, a real supporter? Then catch the action of the clash between Chelsea vs Porto on 15 September 2009, 20:45 GMT.
Also remember that parameterized queries are likely to be faster. They play better with the optimizer cache.
I must mention that the main reason IE6 is still around is because XP is still around.
Why projects like http://wpf.codeplex.com/ and http://aspnet.codeplex.com/ ?

Why wouldn't they? The Developer community does some of the work for MS, and MS gets a bigger and happier developer community.
If there's a culture that refuses to upgrade software, then the solution requires both the education of those who are not upgrading, and the solutions to let them do it. For example, present the relative costs of staying put (mainly risk to the business, e.g. several million dollars a few years from now if everything breaks), against the costs of hiring someone to fix it. Bring in the people who could fix it, and find some quotes.

In other words, the people who made the irresponsible decision to stick with old software should have to cover the cost of fixing it. Every site on the Internet should not continue to cover this cost for them.
Since you asked for it:

http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzalez/Teaching/Phys7221/v...

David Jones tries to create an unrideable bicycle (and nearly fails).
Building an unrideable bicycle
If you teach critical thinking, the how of thinking, the how to approach problems, the whys of things known, then knowledge comes easy and remains accessible for life. If you teach many facts, then there is little progress of critical thinking. It's like data without a processor. Data is not so hard to find these days, how to process remains mysticism for many.
> 1000+ unread articles

FTFY.
"Providing a maven build will make it trivial for anyone with maven installed to build a project, making it easier to adopt clojure project in an organization that uses a lot of java."

No doubt true, but the other side is that folks like me who barely know what Maven is, and would prefer to not do a lot of Java, are put off from trying Clojure (or certain Clojure tools and libs) because it appears too married to Java tools.

Sort of like telling people that to use Rails they first need to use autoconf or something because Ruby is C under the hood.
It's using categories that were defined in 1950. So they presumably had to lump computer jobs into something else.
Maybe add a vote for home-office workers? Been working out of my house for 20 years.
Possible solution: Pay the candidates for the time they spent working on your problems in the interview.

Though I doubt this is a problem in interviews. But asking for a solution even before the interview will skew your distribution of appliciants, like you point out.

Not sure if this is a bad thing --- you want to hire people for whom solving your problems is easy.
to paraphrase from a couple sections of the article: they are making judgements of 'like me, not like me' and that 'like me' is better than not like me. they may not have context for what black and white are or for that matter race, but they are still making value judgements based on it.
Someday every xkcd strip will have its own website.

(that wouldn't be so bad actually)
Electric Motorcycle Hits 150 MPH, Breaks Speed Record
Cubicle! HAHA.

I work in my undies, in my own apartment, and 14 hours removed from the "office" time zone.
I'll just make my point using a quote from Linus Torvalds:

"I'm a big believer in "technology over politics". I don't care who it comes from, as long as there are solid reasons for the code, and as long as we don't have to worry about licensing etc issues. I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out. There are 'extremists' in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred."

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/07/linus-torvalds...
last 5 years here :-)
I go to this site, close a popup, and... I just have a blank screen with "log in" or "sign up" links? Seems like a basic interface problem.
Please keep me informed, if you hit on anything. I like your way of thinking through it.
OK, so they have just the usual reasons.
I'd love to hear some perspectives from some HN folks who live in NYC. My wife and I were there for a week in Jan; I thought it was awesome, but it was my first time, so I don't have anything to compare it to.
Tim Bray mentions there that he jokingly calls himself Canada's second most famous computer programmer. For anyone else who's wondering, the most famous would appear to be James Gosling.
also, if you're using PDO:

$stmt = $dbh->prepare( 'SELECT foo, bar from fooBar where foo = :fooValue' );
$stmt->bind( ':fooValue', $foo );
$stmt->execute();
You can make CSS sprites automatically. I'm not sure thats the best idea in the world, but its certainly doable.
This sounds like a bad idea to me if taken too seriously. Makefiles come from a grammar not a 5th order markov process. The sampled strings from the markov chain are not likely to be representative of the makefiles encountered in practice. I suspect that the makefile language is probably too complex for formal verification so I understand the problem, but I would prefer their other approach where they take large numbers of real world makefiles and compare the output seems a better choice. Just spend the effort and get a larger and more diverse set of test makefiles.
That's really fascinating--thanks for elaborating.

That said, this isn't, for me, a strong refutation of design. Perhaps the designer's purpose was to create creatures with imperfections such as these, with the higher purpose of communicating something deeper.

Or, is there any way of knowing that we won't some day discover there is a very good reason for this?
"There is nothing to do in Sinatra except to get to work on your application, which is a good thing."

What does Sinatra use for layouts and views and partials by default? Last I looked it appeared to be .... nothing.

It seems then that for anything non-trivial you're either inventing a view system or tacking one on. Am I missing something about this?

Among the things I like about Ramaze is that, like Sinatra, I can do the all-in-one-file web app if I like, but if I decide to refactor to layouts and views and such there's an obvious, ready path. Ramaze lets me evolve smoothly from dead-simple to high sophistication, and I don't see that with Sinatra.
Yes. But since which facts you choose is basically irrelevant, you can choose an area that your students like.
You couldn't be more wrong guys :)
A lot of IT professionals and noobies in Russia dream of MacBook. The different question is that the apple products are much more expensive here rather than overseas.

Almost everybody tries to bring it from USA, via eBay or somebody.
Adding Columns to large MySQL Tables Quickly
The main thing that bugged me about Microsoft's commercial is that a young girl isn't likely to do all of the things she was said to do. That is, she supposedly reads rave reviews of Windows 7 (that were probably in words above her grade level), understands them, and turns them all into a fancy slideshow with music; all while using Windows, the most awkward of all operating system user interfaces in the world?

I think the idea of using children to sell the computer is fine, but why not show them doing what a child would do? After all, isn't the point to show what makes a PC valuable to your family, and not what makes it valuable to marketing on behalf of Microsoft?
That's exactly what the page says NOT to do - attempt to escape input data. Instead, use MySQLi_STMT http://de2.php.net/manual/en/class.mysqli-stmt.php
Sweet! An open source project that I have (kind of) contributed to before made the list! I wrote some code for Pylot to support dynamic fields (in my case it was my ASP.NET "__VIEWSTATE" field, but it could be adjusted to support any dynamic field). I don't think my contribution has been committed to the trunk, but Corey added me to the list of contributors anyway, so that was nice :)
Howies Apprentice 4
Howie’s Apprentice 4 is an excellent internet marketing course with personal coaching training course for those who want to start a profitable online business or bring their existing business to the next level.
Easy Sales Formula
Easy Sales Formula is a new sales boosting course from Keith Wellman. Easy Sales Formula will be launched on 17th of September 2009. Easy Sales Formula is designed to teach you exactly how you can use video on your website to multiply your sales. The prelaunch stage of easy sales formula is almost over and is on fire. Almost 70,000 people have opted in for the course and buzz is sky high.
Or you can just install rescue time. I think this is a new feature now.
You can use whatever view-building libary you wish with Sinatra. Last I looked, Sinatra had convenience functions for using Erb and Haml, but there nothing stopping you from using something less well known, such as Tagz.
In my experience (and it is just that), introverts tend to accept the differences as personality, whereas extraverts tend to see introversion as a problem that requires fixing.

"That guy just won't stop talking. I couldn't do that"
vs
"That guy never says anything. I wonder what's wrong?"
I'm at "The Ajax Experience" and saw Steve demo this page. I already have 3-4 pages in my application that I think I can update to use what I got from this site. It's a very nice tool. The only issue is that sometimes the file size of the generated image is larger. I guess they're just using the default settings for pngcrush but I'm not sure how much tweaking the image would help some of my results but it might.
Another interesting one I've stumbled on is the underscore hack. This is a way to apply CSS only to IE 6: http://designpepper.com/2008/01/09/defeating-ie6-with-emphas...

#page {
background-color: white;
_background-color: black;
}

This applies background-color black to IE 6 only, and white to everything else.
So if you want comic-strip security, just go to this site. Perfect.
QuickOffice New Version: Microsoft Office for iPhone
Ask HN:  Fill the shoes of the beloved Rajeev Motwani?
As it relates to being a sounding board and mentor to founders, is anyone aware of a Stanford professor who has tried to fill the huge gap left by the tragic passing of Rajeev Motwani?
PHP HTML Email Learnings with the Mail Function
From the article:

> Baron and Hannan found that companies founded with a commitment model for managing their people were more likely to reach an initial public offering or be acquired at a good price and were much less likely to fail than companies managing their people using other approaches. But — and this is what’s important — companies that shifted to this more effective way of managing people were actually more likely to fail than companies than had begun with a different, less effective way of managing but stayed with it.

> That’s because the benefits of changing to a better way of doing things did not outweigh the disruptive consequences of the transition.

Nice. Confusing causation with correlation in one sentence.
Not to mention the tethering loophole is gone in 3.1 too.
Myriad Acquires Xumii
It says "all objects of the same constructor", which can be losslessly translated to "all objects with the same prototype that were created using JavaScript's retarded way of trying to look kind of like a class-based OO language when really it's not at all".

If you change an object's prototype, that object is no longer "of the same constructor". "Ninja.prototype = { 'swingSword' : ...}" is, in fact, a completely different, far more dramatic action than "Ninja.prototype.swingSword = ..." You shouldn't at all have the expectation that the two are anything alike.
It is a problem for freelancers - people always ask for free solutions to real problems and various ways. Candidate employees are in the same situation, but during the worst possible time - the interview.

As you said, you want to hire people for whom solving your problems is easy. Keep in mind that your problems are not unique and probably already have a solution, so you really need someone that.....woops...almost gave it away ;)
I like this idea quite a bit. No application server means less maintenance and less administrative overhead.

Of course, it also means that the newly-empowered database has to scale out just as easily as an application server. For starters, request authentication becomes the responsibility of the database, and that could mean heavy volume.
I disagree. I go blind looking at bright white backgrounds all day.

It also happens to be an excellent tutorial regardless of colors used.. =)
I think it might be a bit more helpful to explain to people why or how parameterized queries are better than "doing it yourself" for this sort of thing.
Wow. That's very cool.