skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ballmer's not exactly a visionary:

In a post from June [http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/02/web-death-google] Boris relates a famous story about a meeting between Yahoo and Microsoft which took place when Yahoo was still a small start-up:

"Yahoo was growing at neck-breaking speed and David Filo and Jerry Yang were invited to Redmond to talk about working together.

"The meeting turned into a disappointment when Steve Ballmer joined the conversation and gave his opinion on the future of search engines. According to Ballmer Search Engines were a temporary solution to a temporary problem. Ballmer claimed that 'within a few years there will only be a handful of websites left. People will use their Favorites to navigate to those destination sites and nobody will need a Search engine except for a few students and professors.'"

Oops.
One could also argue (without data saying either way) the opposite: that repeated exposure to this sort of thing just serves to desensitise and feel less guilt.

Note: I don't actually think that there's a causal link between violent media and crime: it takes an already marred individual to go out and commit atrocities, which the media are happy to scapegoat. 99.999% of people playing or watching violent games or movies would never even dream of replicating scenarios in real life.
http://www.aquaphoenix.com/ref/jdk1.0.2_api/java.net.URLConn...

setRequestProperty is there.
You can have closed proprietary programs and have completely open standard file formats.

Sure, but can you have open free programs and closed, locked-down, proprietary formats? It's a separate issue, perhaps, but it's a very closely related one.
That's the open source view. Practical, fun, and no attention paid to ethics.

And yet what do we see? Microsoft, Apple, etc. trying to dominate things. They don't want anyone to even think about ethics and freedom for users and developers.

Because of their actions I think it's even more important to take ethics and freedom into consideration.

It's like politics...the reason to pay attention is because everyone else is an asshole and will eventually try and screw you over in some way.
> You could probably accomplish the same thing much more easily by just packing a stroller full of explosives and detonating THAT in the security line.

Exactly. The problem with all this security theater is that if you wanted to just kill a bunch of people there are 100's of ways to do it, low tech and cheap.

What bugs me about all this is that the 'terrorists' so far have shown surprisingly little sophistication in the attacks they have made, mostly because they didn't have to. (well, maybe the 'shoe bomber' should count).

For the most part, if the stated goal was to bring down western society they're taking their bloody time about it, security really isn't that good.

My guess is that this is all blown way out of proportion.

Sure, there are some bad guys, but there are less of them than seems to be presented, and they're pretty busy doing other stuff.

Blowing up an airliner is a publicity stunt, it isn't going to derail society unless you let it.

Germany had an enormous terrorism flap in the 70's, and 80's, according to the media.

But in reality several tens of people died and somewhat more were wounded.

Much less than a year on the autobahn.
What he did was impressive, but anyone could have done the same.

I don't think the field of writing software has many true geniuses really. We're all just cranking out code.

Coming up with new algorithms is impressive, but churning out code is less so IMHO.
There's plenty of good about Stallman, no doubt. But you can be the stubbornest mule on the farm without being insulting.

And I find name-calling and posturing to be in conflict with 'brutal honesty'.
I'm sorry about all the translation hassles. If I knew it would be read by so many people outside Romania, I would have made in English in the first place.

Thanks for visiting. :)
We've found Java's regular expression capabilities to be a bit frustrating at times. Although they're easy to use, they can be very slow for certain types of regexes. Does anyone know of a "fast regex" class?
What an excellent article. This should be required reading for anyone looking to get into web application development or marketing. I can't tell you how many half-baked ideas I've listened to where all they need is a "developer".
ReCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures
Three Reasons The GOP Hates Net Neutrality
I completely agree.
"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem." - Milton Friedman

What about you guys?
>> "Of course, it is not forcing, you can stay not opening the attachment, suppress the curiosity."

Exactly. So comparing it to slavery is ridiculous.

You're right though, they are interlinked. Still, no one is forcing anyone to use proprietary software.
Good catch. I left radioactive dating out when I wrote out the list.
you have to fundamental right to make it free or not

False. You do NOT have the right to restrict what I do with "your" ideas, once you've shared them with me - be it software, sonnet, or poem. The government may limit my fundamental freedom by enforcing a limited-time monopoly, but only in order to encourage you to work on your ideas.

It is NOT your fundamental right to have such monopoly indefinitely.
jobs.freelanceswitch.com

the site itself is a reasonable community of freelancers, and they pay attention to the job board.
I had a small change sitting in a branch for about a month and wanted to update. I didn't want to do a merge. I did find that someone had created a simple rebase plugin for bzr, though. That made things a lot easier.

I tend to commit lots of incremental progress. I talked to a couple of bzr users who do the same. They insisted that it was important to their project to include these changes that definitely don't compile (e.g. "committing because I'm getting up to go to the bathroom"), etc... in the long-term history of the project because it can help them remember what they were thinking when they were writing the code.

Personally, I do the similar, but I rebase -i before I push and squash and reorder most of that down into small, working chunks that most accurately reflect the real changes to the project.

That is, it's a higher priority to me to say what happened than how it happened. I'm thoroughly uninterested in what the state of the codebase was when you came up with the idea to work on something, how many times you pulled upstream code down, how many times you went to the bathroom, etc... I just want to know when your change went in that affected the state of the project, and exactly what it did.

Theoretically, a recursive merge message would tell me this. In practice, it does not, and the merge diffs don't necessarily show the change that affected the tree, but the delta that had to be applied to resolve conflicts on the merge.

I used to be a gnu arch user, and as such, I used to find it of utmost important to record every minor file save in my permanent history. I've learned since then that it doesn't help me actually understand the project.

Also, the use of sequence numbers (hg has the same problem) causes a lot of confusion. Humans seem to like the idea that there's an easy to understand sequence, but that's false on any project with more than one developer.

Specifically I had this problem with "buildbot try" -- the default implementation does a working-tree diff against the same revno upstream (e.g. if "bzr version-info" says 571, then it uses "bzr diff" to create a patch and sends it upstream against 571). However, if I've committed locally (because...that's just the right thing to do), then it will find either than upstream doesn't have a 572, or it's a different 572. Enter "bzr revision-info -rsubmit:" which introduces network (took 7.49 seconds for me just now) and "bzr diff -rrevid:[long-string-i-can't-double-click].."

I can't tell you all of the exact scenarios that were causing me confusion, but they came down to things like the above.
why issue this warning

My first thought was that someone in the security lobby must be about to market a 'solution'. Something that looks good on Security Theatre.
Is Software Handmade?
"""If you are on the receiving end, you only have to agree with the terms."""

This is where I see a problem.

Can somebody suppress my rights (to share, to sing, etc.), in the form of terms? Is a right is something that I can trade?

I don't understand these issues much, just doubts :-(
That would heavily weight against simple comments, which might be a good thing.

It might be better to hurt the leaders based on the ratio of <=0 comments.
"may be useful for learning the basis of the Lisp language".
To a certain extent this really comes down to semantics. If someone is writing a complex algorithm to describe a physical phenomenon that has been observed in a lab, are they a physicist or a computer scientist?

I tend to disagree with the authors conclusion. I'll concede the theoretical point that anything can be computed, but this doesn't make computer science fundamental. By my definition, Physics is the study of the most fundamental components of the universe and algorithms are an indispensible tool in that study.

It is possible to write an algorithm that perfectly describes what happens when you get hit by a car. This is not the same thing as you actually getting hit by the car. In other words, algorithms are a description of what is happening, not the actual events themselves.
A valid version of the question is when was the last prizeworthy discovery was made. Giant magnetoresistance (2007 prize) was discovered in 1988. Bose-Einstein condensates (2001 prize) were figured out in 1995. I can't find any more recent discoveries.

They seem to be trying to clear the backlog. This year's prize is shared by two basically unrelated ideas, which must be a strategy to catch up.
Learning all this is very important.

There are people out there working on problems that are either solved, easily mappable to a solved problem, or proven impossible. Don't be one of those people. Don't be one of many to reinvent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming in a new problem domain. Don't learn http://pmbook.ce.cmu.edu/ the hard way.
If I'm not mistaken, the same trick you mention in "Part 2" can be used to deceive the client for any false certificate, not just a null-prefix certificate.
Actually, thanks to market forces and monopolies of various sorts, you are eventually forced to use proprietary software. The example someone else gave was Microsoft Office file formats.

Here's a better example: almost all webdesign, graphic design, and other jobs of that type want you to have experience in Adobe products. So what ends up happening is that because people want the jobs, they learn Photoshop. Now it may be a great program, but it's still proprietary and you get locked into Adobe's upgrade cycle because the latest version is The Industry Standard...always, it's fucked up how that works really.

So if someone has had experience with the GIMP or some other free software, and can do the work just as well as a Photoshop user, their resume will be dumped because the Adobe name has a lot of weight. That someone will then figure out that to get a job, they'll also have to use proprietary software.

You don't live in a vacuum where you can do what you want.
It would be interesting to see the top 100 sites ranked by gross-profit by user.
because it's useful?
Isn't that sort of the premise of this site as well - there is sort of a filter/mechanic that preserves the site's culture/intent by dissuading trolls.

I think you're hitting on something pretty profound though - so much of what is out there says that casual/web games need to be inclusive to the point of genericism. This instead is pretty exclusive by today's standards in that you need to interact with the computer in a non-graphic interface. So maybe this shows that one can be successful even without catering to everyone (in online games).
List of books on the history of computing [Wikipedia]
"only fools and geniuses insist on implementing their own languages,
and you can never tell which is which until afterwards."
That sounds about right, based on my usage. I understand how Google makes money from its users, and I've heard about Yahoo's struggles to make money from its users, but I'm still puzzled how Facebook makes money from its users. (I visit Facebook with AdBlock and Facebook Purity on, so I generally don't see Facebook ads, which I remember as very schlocky from when I could still see them.)
Well, I for one can't wait for someone to come and show us whiny and despairing web developers how it's done.

Moronic article that seems to think that comparing apples to battleships somehow makes sense.

(Speaking as a game developer for 14 years and a web developer for 8).
I'm guessing the most you can hope for is a bit of publicity and perhaps getting on the radar of a couple of NYC tech players. I don't think you lose any IP rights so you can always continue to develop your idea if there is some level of success.
Kansas city home builders
For over 30 years, Tom French has been designing and building outstanding custom homes in the Kansas City area.
Sadly Yegge's solution to his innumeracy consisted of trawling through the same list of categories which presumably failed him at school. I wonder how that turned out?

There's a reason hackers tend not to be good at 'high school math' - it's incredibly dull. 90% of what most of us did in class consists of essentially running code, the stuff hackers expect the machine to do for us (so we can concentrate on the real problem.)

I think solving mathematical education for the general population is incredibly hard, I wish Paul Lockhart (http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256176)
all the best in his efforts. But I think solving mathematical education for hackers ought to be a little easier. We are eminently comfortable with symbolic languages (consistent, testable ones - I'm not sure if many mathematical notations can make the same claim), and we love problem solving. You'd have thought we'd have a hard time not becoming good at math.

Does anyone have any suggestions? How about a textbook where the methods and proofs are expressed in code, for a start?
As someone who struggled with schooling for quite a while, this story strikes somewhat close to home. Even the "advanced" courses had little to offer, I either already knew it, or it was trivially easy for me to deduce or learn.

I did, however, have one lucky point that many of these stories seem to be missing: a large number of my teachers didn't care what I did, as long as I was able to keep up in my classes. This meant that all through middle school and most of high school, rather than pay attention in class I would read some place in the realm of 1000-2000 pages a week, usually of various types of fantasy or science fiction books. I also had a handful of teachers who encouraged me to work on any problem I found particularly interesting, suggesting that I keep working on it well past the point required by the course.

I personally believe that is the way that any sort of gifted student should be taught. The current remedial->"regular"->advanced set of curriculum seems to work fairly well for those that fall into those categories, and by encouraging those above the advanced level to work on their own, above and beyond the classwork, on what they find interesting, you manage to meet their educational needs too. I am strongly against home-schooling and private schools, at least for those on the highest end of the intellectual scale. Any sort of educational situation where your entire peer group is of the same intellectual capacity leads to later problems. You develop the mindset that everyone is exactly like you, and that they have the same abilities and capabilities of yourself. Anyone who does not share your abilities becomes inferior, and you are able to de-humanize them.

Its mostly anecdotal, but with few exceptions ever single I have met who was home schooled, went to a private "gifted" school, or was in the IB program (which, at least in our area, segregates a public school into regular students and the IB students, and the IB students rarely, if ever, encounter the other students through the course of a day) has had a negative view of anyone with other skills and abilites, or at least those that have abilities that were not present in the peer group they were schooled with. A schooling method that teaches advanced students more advanced subjects, but also encourages slurs for "normal students" and the concept that the students are, by nature, better than everyone else, is not at all a good thing.
Objective-C Tuesdays: The for loop
Palm to Developers: We Love You, We Want You
I know HN has many times debated the reasons for the high ratio of men to women in the entire startup field, but I think it's important to point out yet again that sexism does play a role in preventing more women from joining the field. This article is especially interesting because it takes the concerns one step higher and sheds light on how few women are even working at the VC layer.

I concede that not every industry needs to have a perfect 50/50 split. But I don't think it's fair to dismiss sexism with the argument that women are simply "less risk taking". Perhaps they're not willing to take risks in this area because they don't see their chances of being rewarded as very good -- e.g., they feel they won't be allowed to be a managing partner, or won't have access to the best investment opportunities.
Funny you mention that - it's actually how I got on this tangent. according to wikipedia:

"Twenty-four states have legislated that surveying measures should be based on the U.S. survey foot, eight have legislated that they be made on the basis of the international foot, and eighteen have not specified the conversion factor from metric units"

Yea. Survey foot. That's not even the current international standard for the length of a foot. Ridiculous. Glad I'm not an interstate contractor that has to deal with this mess.
Who cares that it's from someone promoting their company? They're giving data that a lot of people are interested in, that hasn't been put elsewhere. The fact that it's better, more thorough data than other places also shows that there just might be a better source out there for gathering data (ie RJMetrics). Everyone wins.
"We all live in the Matrix ... we live in a Turing machine."

Is the Matrix a Turing machine?
The comparison to slavery may not be very good, I agree.

However, he is making a valid point and you are neglecting to see it.

Not everyone is a super-man that can ignore the influences of their environment. We have to deal with other people and their sometimes strange ideas and you're assuming that we don't, or at least you're assuming that there are no negative consequences for ignoring the rest of the environment and doing what you want.
It's ridiculous that a student who barely coasts through the most remedial track can graduate because of social promotion, but a motivated kid who takes college courses can't get a diploma.
I'm not an IP expert, but I think there's a SERIOUS problem here, and it's called "the US patent office." Patents should be issued for real INNOVATIONS that a 6th grader can't come up with in 10 seconds.

Yahoo now has a patent for human-assisted rankings? Wow. What does this mean for sites like mahalo.com?

Amazon was issued a patent for one-click ordering system [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click] allowing a user to use a predefined address and credit card number to purchase one or more items. Seriously!?

Cendant has a patent (& sued Amazon over it) for a "System and Method for Providing Recommendation of Goods or Services Based on Recorded Purchasing History"...

What's next? http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29130
What's greener, blue or yellow?
It could very well be that people who are already marred enjoy violent games more and that contributes to the supposed connection between violent games and violence in real life.
Can Someone Please Send This to Keith Ferrazzi?
But you need to have a cert signed by an authority the browser trusts, which is why you need the null-prefix attack.
That's easy -- they make money from ads -- just like Google. I doubt all of your friends are using AdBlock and Facebook Purity.
I think at any level level of reasoning where you compare computer science and physics they become pretty indistinguishable. At that point it's all about which words you use to describe it.

Some pretty important ones seem to be: entropy, energy, information, logic, and computability. Those seem to sit squarely between information theory, physics, and math.

I think what this debate really means is that we're not yet going to find some sort of nice hierarchy where every result in chemistry can be considered a practical simplification of something squarely in physics. Instead perhaps both physics and CS are attacking a problem so fundamental that eventually there will be a new body of study that considers both CS and physics both to be a practical simplification of its results.

Exciting, no?
One more list on the same:
http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/
That is true chimariko but you have to admit that most of the biggest money making games involve violence.
One could also argue that repeated exposure to this sort of thing increases one's likelihood of becoming a professional juggler.

Without actual data, all we have to run on are intuitions, probably-broken metaphors, and guesswork. I don't generally trust any of those to result in a rational decision.
Judge rules against Autodesk in eBay software case
Business ideas that will get your ass sued off
I don't think just anyone could have done the same, but supposing for the sake of argument that it's true, I think not many people would have done the same, which is what compels me to respect rms in the same way as I would respect William Wallace as portrayed in the movie Braveheart. Sacrificing your life for the freedom of others takes no great feat of intellect or even physical skill, but in some ways, I think being willing to do such a thing deserves more respect than, say, proving P=NP.
oneforty is a great idea, well executed and Laura rocks! I wish them all the best. Also, if i were Twitter i would buy them now - great asset to have in the long run.
I thought the same. Then, I was trying to find examples for systems that cannot be simplified further without changing their functional definitions. For instance, chopsticks appear to be a tool that is as simple as it can be.
The Alpha Course "Does God exist?" online poll is fixed
The Alpha Course in the UK are running a marketing campaign at the moment with posters asking the question "Does God exist?" followed by empty tick boxes for Yes/No/Probably. They've got the same thing on their homepage at http://uk.alpha.org/ set up as an online poll, complete with "see results so far" link.

Problem is..

clicking yes always returns 36-34-30.
clicking no always returns 35-34-30.
clicking probably always returns 35-34-31.

The votes are being posted to and the "results" returned by http://uk.alpha.org/?q=/alpha09/poll&vote=[yes|no|probably] - view source to see the html returned with the "results".

Amusingly you can get the stats as high as 40% "no" by adding lots of votes at once e.g. http://uk.alpha.org/?q=/alpha09/poll&vote=no&vote=no&vote=no&vote=no&vote=no etc. see here: http://bit.ly/somethingfishygoingon

Of course as soon as you vote anything else the numbers return to normal.

Regardless of your religious beliefs, surely this is pushing the line a bit far in terms of presenting it as a real poll when the results are fixed?