skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the average programmer, having to pair full-time means they won't get to waste time during the day on [..] Hacker News.

If my employer wouldn't allow me to read HN during the day, then I'd go find another one. Constantly learning and improving myself is what keeps me going and HN helps me in that. I consider it my study time, which I otherwise don't get (one of the major disadvantages of this employer).
Text::Pipe trademark controversy (Perl module != commercial TextPipe Pro)
Ask HN: hnnotify.com - useful to any users here?
Howdy, HN. I recently finished up a community college course in RoR (I'm usually a learn-on-my-own type person, but being busy I thought that having assignments, etc. would keep me on track with the learning task) and the beginnings of Hacker News Notify was my final project. I had some time this past weekend, so I finished it up and thought some folks here might find it useful.

Hacker News Notify allows you to create a watch list for submissions with particular phrases in the title, submitted from a particular user, or from a particular domain and be notified via email of matches or subscribe to your watch list’s RSS feed. The application scans the "New Links" section of HN (currently) every 15 minutes.

It’s definitely not an example of programming genius and I’m sure many here could whip it up in an hour or less, but hopefully some find it handy in some way.

Thanks.
Perfectly true, I phrased my comment the way I did to get away from the idea that 'all radiation is bad'. EM radiation can be dangerous in that it can cook you if there's too much of it... However it's far less likely to cause the serious tissue and genetic damage that particle radiation would.

I would gladly put my hand in a microwave before I would be willing to bathed in gamma rays...
Link: http://hnnotify.com
oh. then I apologize for the reply if that was the original intention. Haha.
Why is it hard to imagine that selling the 'cool stuff' developers/engineers make (and being the best at it) is motivation enough? Without sales people all the cool stuff we hackers create, would be seen and used by almost no one.

The art of selling, even without the ugly side of it (which there's plenty) is pretty amazing. We all admire guys like Steve Jobs but don't realize that he's the best salesman there is.
Desperation is the new qualification.
I think pairing sucks. Based on my personal experience with it. I'm just not cut out for it, mostly. I'm more comfortable and productive in the the "private office with a door" environment that DeMarco and Spolsky advocate. I don't dispute that pairing works for some people, in some situations.

Despite the overall "we're so smart and so much better than everyone else" attitude in this piece, the still-relevant conclusion is that pairing is not easy, requires large investments in both physical assets and people who want to work that way. He even admits that once your team is larger than a dozen or so, the feasibility of pairing starts to break down because of personality conflicts.
Created by Camtasia Studio 6
Bad Engineering Properties of Object-Oriented Languages by Luca Cardelli
Plus, it's their list, their service, they can decide who is on it for whatever reason they choose to.
1: invent holodeck 2: ???? 3: no longer care about profit
Not to mention that anyone who's ever posted a link via Twitter has probably used a URL shortener.
Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision
I think you might as well make it a .csv, since Excel can read those but other products can't necessarily read Excel spreadsheets (Google Docs/OpenOffice/Zoho probably all handle .csv well).
I recently looked at rackspace cloud but wonder what the appeal of it is in contrast to amazon?

Pricing seems to nearly the same but I didn't like that rackspace doesn't let you scale the storage up independently.
Wow, the Russian programmer scene must be very different from the US because I've literally never met anyone like this in Moscow. Maybe some of my sysadmin friends would score around 10%, but not more. As for those of my friends who went on to work for Google, Microsoft Research or started their own tech companies - I don't think any of them would score above 5% ("Make A Website With HTML").

Upon some thought, the very idea of a "geek checklist" seems misguided to me. I've always tried to do 1 new thing instead of 100 old things, and anyone who succeeds in that gets my respect automatically regardless of their geek points.
Funny that Rich used the number 42 as a recurring example in the interview. After all, 42 is "the answer to life, the universe and everything" (really, just search on google), which basically is what he is trying to find.
What's so unusual about it? Is there any imperative to list Techcrunch and keep it listed no matter what? Even after they publish confidential information that wasn't supposed to be published at all?

If one of your friends (like in real life, you know) stole your diary and started telling all your other friends everything from that diary, would you still be obliged to be friends with him? Pretty obvious, isn't it?

And keep in mind that Twitter's aim is not to be the most objective and complete source of news, you know? They just have a list of sources they think are worth checking.
The Importance Of About Page
Linke to print version of the article: http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/magazine/17-10/...
Same here.
Can you imagine if we had waited around for Comcast or At&T to come out with a viable search engine?

The US will be behind in technology and inovation. But now after seeing Google take the lead, they want to control the internet.
I've met many salespeople I like and many I don't. They are not all self-centered manipulative bullies, though many are. Some are genuinely interested in making shopping a pleasant experience, and as a result get more sales (the particular person I am thinking of does NOT work on commission, incidentally). Some have strong relationships with specific customers, understand their needs very well and understand their company's products very well and rarely ever recommend anything that won't be valued.
The difference is that Apple has a very specific idea what their kernel is for, where as Linux is pushed and pulled in different directions by people who want something very large scale or secure or embedded or lots of archetictures and so on.

Also you should put it in perspective, the Linux kernel itself is really not so bloated, that any normal user would notice, like they do with Gnome/KDE/Firefox's bloat. Even with that type of bloat, Linux distros still run well on a 1GB (probably less) and an old P4 CPU which people don't say about recent releases of OSX or Windows.
Tablets are awesome, it's just the 2000 dollar price point that kept them out of the running.
Way to go Chris!

As someone who has never held a job, I sometimes miss the learning that you can be doing even as a regular nontech employee.
A conversation with Larry Halff about the relaunch of Ma.gnolia
Why? Because they're biased with the information they present to their users? When I see a suggested user list, I want the a list of users whom I would like to follow. Not a list of users who are popular and have not pissed of twitter.

Ok sure, I know this is techcrunch, but I despise it when information comes with hidden agendas. It just smacks of censorship.
If you hadn't said anything, I wouldn't have noticed that these are links. Blame it on the layout of the site.
"It's boxy, gray, and x86-based"

So is the Apple's Mac Pro but no one thinks it needs any plastic decorations.
I was thinking the same thing. This is just what the Rails community needs - another imperious douchebag.
I always feel obligated to post a contrarian point, since I think only people who A: succeed at training and B: have a great experience actually post, whereas all those who don't succeed or have a "meh" experience don't actually post, and these people may be the majority.

I naturally LD with some frequency, especially if the room is a bit too cold. In that case, I'll LD for days in a row at a time, and, well, here's a hint: my reaction is to go turn up the heat.

I think what people are reporting is like riding a roller coaster. It's great fun the first time, and still fun occasionally, but reading about LD being a "life changing experience" is like reading about riding a roller coaster being a life changing experience. Maybe it feels like it the first time, but... no, it really isn't. Well, I will concede that there probably is a small set of people for whom it might be important for some psychological reasons, but in general I doubt it. (Same is true for roller coasters, someone who is afraid of them may see it as a big deal that they got over their fear, but in general, it's not a lifechanger.)

On the other hand, I have to admit that I am also fairly creative and do have a strong sense of self, so perhaps I'm just jaded.

I really doubt it's useful for training though. The brain naturally "practices" (some think that's what dreaming is), and I think all the LD experience is doing is observing stuff that happens anyhow; I doubt the observation actually adds that much.

(Oh, and if you do have problems with recurring nightmares, LD is definitely worth pursuing. In my experience, the best approach once you know you are dreaming is to just let the scary thing happen; if you're scared of heights, fall, if you're chased by the monster, let it eat you, etc. Nothing bad can happen, and eventually your brain will work it out. My dreams are routinely filled with imagery that could be scary in the "wrong context" now, but it's never a problem anymore.)
Don't worry, there are lots of ways things can screw up -- so what gets you will probably be something completely different.

What got me was a simple infection in a tooth. It didn't hurt, so I didn't realize that it was bad. Besides, I was incredibly tired from being "burnt out" which was destroying my life... Let me just say that I'll never see non-functional people in a workplace in the same way. Shudder.

(Yes, totally off-topic. :-)
> 24-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button ... If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

The most deadly group of if/then statements in existence.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." -Joshua, WarGames (1983)
You are making several big assumptions here: 1. Grad students from non-Ivy PhD programs are useless as research collaborators. 2. People doing CS theory need to be smarter than the average CS PhD. 3. People who go to non-Ivy schools are dumber.

These all strike me as ego-driven and unfounded statements.

(Not to mention the giant question mark around IQ as a valid measurement of general intellectual aptitude.)
I tend not to read articles with such sensational titles.
In short, mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity
Don't overlook the large amount of social interaction sales people get, for a people person that is a huge perk and likely just as satisfying as building something cool is to a programmer.
Is that site a mess or is it a mess? I see only one startup. Presumably there is some sort of pagination thing somewhere to see the others, but I can't really figure it out. #fail
adding keywords but the watchlist remains empty. Have you tested?

looks good otherwise.
Macros in JavaScript
Thanks for the good level of detail in that reply. My proclivity as an American who lives at about 45 degrees north latitude would be to look for work on New Zealand's South Island if I wanted to move to an English-speaking country, so that helped a lot.
Meh. I applaud you for being considerate to your girlfriend, but it's no reason to try to change the English language.
Also, his own app ships with a hand picked suggested users list:

http://eyeonwiner.org/archives/2009/dave-admits-hypocrisy
Clever ideas that failed
Which is why I have that one really strong password guarding my keychain, which holds randomly-generated passwords for sites.
Yep. Scripts like explorercanvas (http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/) make this sort of workaround pretty much unnecessary.
From the article:

The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans
at the highest levels—including former top officials
at the State Department and White House—say they've
never heard of it.

From "Dr. Strangelove":

"Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine
is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell
the world?"
I know that Taiwan was relaxed in just the way you describe when I first lived (and worked) there, although I eventually got visas with explicit work permission for most of my two long stays there. And I hear that there are still a lot of English speakers who make the rounds of various countries teaching English, although that's a rather low-income career compared to most high-tech employment.
That depends on the difficult of what they're developing.

Boilerplate code? Two great programmers are a waste.

Moderate difficulty? Maybe less efficient than working separately, but they'll still work a bit faster, produce fewer defects, transfer knowledge well, etc.

Really complex problem? Not a waste at all.
Yes, it seems that the current global economic slowdown has especially hurt persons who move to other countries to work construction and send remittances home.
Eh, normally I find Obie to be sort of a jerk, but most of this doesn't come off that way.
Yeah, it's where I got the difference too. I decided to add it to LYSE after that.
Thanks jeff18 for submitting this. I am attending the SVG Open 2009 conference in a couple weeks to present a paper and a workshop on RaphaëlJS.

As a quick intro, Raphaël can be used to create rich interactive graphics, generating vector elements that are native to the browser and the DOM. Native DOM elements are exposed to Javascript, allowing for them to be used in the same manner as any other HTML element.

Raphaël can attach Javascript handlers, events, animations, and other features native to Javascript to SVG/VML elements created in Raphaël. Raphaël works in IE6+, FF3+, Safari 3+, and Opera 9.5+.

The presentation and paper will be available on the SVG Open website (as soon as I finish it): http://www.svgopen.org/2009/registration.php?section=abstrac...
Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate
Review: Javascript - The Good Parts
It just smacks of censorship

It is censorship which a private company like Twitter is perfectly entitled to perform. I have no problem with them doing this. Every company decides on its view of the truth to present to the world.
Pretty easy:

1) I was dreaming

2) I had the conscious thought "hey, this stuff doesn't make sense. I am dreaming. Wow, I am aware that I'm dreaming, even though I'm dreaming."

3) I then took conscious steps to alter my dream, for instance, stepping out of the car within which I was and flying away.

Of course, you could try arguing that I just dreamt that I was making conscious decisions, but that's just splitting hairs.
Priyanka Chopra covers Beauty Magazine
Priyanka Chopra the rolling girl of the bollywood this time covers the frontpage of Beauty Magazine for the month of September 2009. We have already seen Priyanka Chopra covering magazines many times in the recent months. In this issue of Beauty Magazine she talks about on her looking good rules. With the recent hit under her name Priyanka once again proves out to be successful and touched new heights.
Implicit and explicit voting: a future baseline for search?
Building an Open Source Bussard (Fusion) Reactor
You did a really nice job. The language needed a gentle intro.

Cesarini/Thompson book is excellent, aside from typo's but it's like drinking from a firehose. Good for people who like ruby, python, scheme DSL / metaprogramming tricks, challenging for everybody else.

One thing, can you give more vertical space between lines in source code listings (the bits in Courier font; also listing of shell/interpreter sessions). They're jammed tightly together in Firefox 3.0.14, winXP SP 3.
Technically, Steve Jobs is in Marketing (creating the market / generating the leads) rather than sales (turning leads into customers)...
Oddly enough, I'm actually a little relieved that it does eventually come down to a person's decision. I guess if the decision is to end the world, a 24 year-old junior officer is as qualified to make the decision as anyone else.

I'm definitely more than a little concerned that they're still maintaining this thing though.... creepy
30 years of C
Did you notice the "PLEASE CHOOSE THE UP-TO-DATE MEASUREMENTS INSTEAD OF THESE!" ?
Simple API for Cloud Application Services
Yes, tested, registered another new user and keyword just now after reading your comment. Would you try again when you have a minute?
... And even better he accepted money for listing on his suggested users list. Pay to play!

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014/2003/07/07.html#a4052
A question that's been on my mind: Why did Facebook scale so well and Twitter scale so poorly? Is there really any way to learn how to cope with huge load before you actually hit the point where you need it?
Please read the entire article. It explains that the main function of the system was not intended to be deterrence towards the enemy, but deterrence towards the own side's hawks, who might be less eager to launch a nuclear response based on incomplete data when they know that there is an automated response designed to work when all else fails.
I agree. Writing a web server is a trivial programming task. Want to do something networking that's hard? Write a TCP/IP stack: that was my first real job.
I don't know if LT and RMS would have gotten along in that way, but how productive over the years has each one been? If you put them on the same team and paid them well, and they had goals they shared, etc., etc., I don't find it all that unlikely.
Very very nice, it seems to offer more capabilities than using the javascript canvas facilities (dashed or dotted lines for example) plus the fact that the graphic elements are in a DOM structure makes it easier to update existing graphics rather than having to redraw everything.

Its now on my todo list to experiment with it.
Someone who is able to think and talk at the same speed is either an impractically fast talker or an impractically slow thinker.
Don't forget semicolon, when neither a period nor a comma is enough, so you just decide to put both in. And also the places where you must not have any of them, or else, even if it looks like it might be good.

The biggest (IMHO) justifiable complaint against Python's indentation-sensitive syntax is that it makes copying and pasting harder (in editors that don't support it or with people who don't know the indentation commands...), but I've had more luck copying-and-pasting Python (with no adjustment) than I have Erlang. With Python you have good odds that you're on the same indentation in both source and dest, with Erlang the odds that you're going to screw up ",;. " (and note the space in that quote on the end, it's part of the set) approach 100% in my experience.

Nice language in many ways... shame about the syntax.
That is probably the very best security. With a keychain you can have passwords that are sixteen or even thirty-two characters long and you never have to remember them, just the one password that you use to access the keychain. Ultimate security, and if one site gets hacked you don't have to worry.
I have different levels of passwords:

1) Doesn't matter, it's fairly weak and I use it for spammy stuff.

2) It matters, I use it for accounts I care about, but nothing that would ruin my life. It's strong, but it's used in a couple places.

3) Banks, etc -- these all get can't-crack-it-in-1000-years passwords that are all different.

I have them written down long hand, but I think the chance of an arbitrary burglar making it through my dog, alarm system, up stairs to my office, then ignoring my 5 monitors and 3 nice computers in favor of a nondescript stack of papers on a book shelf, then getting away with said papers, and using them to break into my bank accounts seems kind of far fetched. Call me crazy.
The numbers show why you should choose a complex password.
Although I already had a fairly good understanding of why you should choose a complex password when I first sat down and worked out the figures I was quite surprised at the margin between a good password and a bad one, so I thought it was worth sharing. This chart began life as a way to convince my non-techie friends that they should make their email and banking passwords slightly harder to guess than 'monkey'. It's worth noting that in a lot of cases a password taking interface will implement rate-limiting, which can mean that even simple passwords become almost impossible to guess. However we can't assume that this will always be the case and so choosing a proper password retains it's value.

Below is a table showing the approximate strengths and cracking times of a variety of simple passwords. Each password is constructed from a 'character
set', each of which is easy to type with a standard US Keyboard. The cracking times are estimated using a baseline rate of 1000 password guesses per second which should be easily achievable using commodity hardware.

Note: Any password that uses dictionary words will be guessed even faster than listed below. This is because cracking programs will generally use a list of dictionary words and try them all before resorting to trying random combinations of characters. Given that there are (including scientific terms) approximately 1 Million words in the English language any password consisting solely of a single, lower-case, english word could be cracked in only 16 minutes!

Character Set	No. of characters in set
________________________________________________________________
Lowercase (L):	26	abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Upper and Lowercase (UL):	52	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Upper, Lower, Numerals (ULN):	62	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789
Upper, Lower, Numerals, Symbols (ULNS):	94	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789~`!@#$%^&*()_-+={[]}:;"'<,>.?/|\

Example password strengths:
___________________________
Length: 5	Characters: L	Possible variations:	11881376	Time to crack:	3.3	hours	Example: abcde
Length: 5	Characters: UL	Possible variations:	380204032	Time to crack:	105.6	hours	Example: AbCdE
Length: 5	Characters: ULN	Possible variations:	916132832	Time to crack:	254.5	hours	Example: A12cd
Length: 5	Characters: ULNS	Possible variations:	7339040224	Time to crack:	2,038.6 hours	Example: !A1cd
Length: 7	Characters: ULN	Possible variations:	3521614606208	Time to crack:	978,226.2 hours	Example: 1AbCdE2
Length: 7	Characters: ULNS	Possible variations:	64847759419264	Time to crack:	18,013,266.5 hours	Example: !cd1FE_
WebGL promises to bring hardware-accelerated graphics to the Web
And where are the "else" branches, eh? Is this the final confirmation that multiple method exit points are evil?
Indian code monkey ?!?! {...} certain innate aptitude (that presumably they don't have in your opinion){...}

wow
Wow, I had the luck of meeting Aaron a few years ago. I have actually referenced him as when I learned the limit of my own intelligence - I had a 4.0 gpa as a CS major and thought myself quite bright, until I was simply blown away by the orders of magnitude greater ability to think about complex problems that he possessed.

It's incredibly disheartening to read that post. It seems tragic that someone like Aaron would be shut out due to not attending the right school.
I'm having a hackers party this friday night. i might have to post this all over my apt as decoration.

also, i have a payphone and jolt cola. god, i can't wait.