skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would add to this that it's important to view optimism and pessimism in the face of risk as a conscious choice. Which view you take is your strategy for acting in the face of that risk.

The research presented in the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman more or less tells us that people who make this choice consciously have the highest rates of success in life.

The rule, then, is if the consequence of taking the risk and failing is dire, you should be pessimistic, otherwise, always be optimistic. That is, if failing would be catastrophic or really bad, believe that the worst will happen and act accordingly. If the consequence of failure is trivial or not a problem, believe that the best will happen and act accordingly.
Blitzer Railgun Completes First Successful Test Firing
The same source, slightly expanded - http://www.nsl.com/k/ray/ray.k
> That is horrific.

Yes, just thinking about having to worry about boustrophedon makes my head hurt.

But apparently it's faster to read, so it's not all bad ;-)

> PS The vertical writing on book spines is a life saver.

I can imagine. The constant twisted neck when searching for books in a library can't be healthy...
I didn't call you dumb. I said that your implication was dumb. And it still is.

I'm not really sure what you wanted me to get out of that blog post. I did cite a study- I linked to it. And the definition of heritability is still the same.
Unfortunately the source is rather poorly coded - it's Arthur's "K in every language" style of C - and A+ has a lot of assumptions that I'm not comfortable with. I'd love a modernized K interpreter suitable for use by stylish gentlemen. Which perhaps could be the name..
Twitter is Useless: Simple Case Study
Reminds me of the wave going around at a stadium. Clever when it starts and even better once everyone is on board. Eventually though, an event in the game distracts the crowd and the wave dies; Not so lucky with Twitter.
Amazon.com touts expertise in 'frustration-free' packaging
Settler's is great, but a lot of people will complain it leaves too much to chance. That's actually partly why it remains fun for beginners, and the law of averages usually works out for the experienced folks in the end anyway.

For those looking for a less random experience, there's Puerto Rico, which is almost entirely deterministic. Agricola showed up on the scene recently and everyone's been raving about it.
First of all, Amazon S3 is absolutely not a CDN.

How easy would these be to guess?

There is a 1:3e38 chance of two randomly generated UUIDs colliding.

What is the best algorithm to create them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier#I...

Should I just make them all private and use authenticated access controls?

If your users don't want other people peaking at their files (DropBox): yes absolutely. If your users don't care (HotorNot), then no.
Definitely tune your robots.txt

But if you put exact URLs in your robots.txt, then a normal person could pick them up from there and access your content.

Make sure you use a directory structure and forbid all files from the content directory :-)
Anyone else see the title of this link look all scrambled?
> I think the author's point at the end was: "Unicode" as a concept won't localize your programs for you. Well, duh?

That's his point as I understand it. But I disagree with the "duh" part. It's rare to see software that goes beyond simple translation.
The percentages look like a standard gimmick to make the article more readable and create an attention-getting headline. The message is still valid though.
I would second the idea of using a hash as the secret file name, however I would also recommend salting the hash with the current unix time. While having a collision between 2 different strings is extremely unlikely, having 2 users upload files with the same name is going to happen at some point.

I would also recommend adding a salt to stop an attacker from being able to guess URLs by hashing common filenames. Though using the time in the hash is likely to prevent this, it's low-cost and probably worth it.

So, I would recommend (in PHP):

$url = md5( 'my_salt_string' . $time . $file_name );

But as Michael noted above, none of this can ever guarantee you security...
Are sales-tax exempt textbooks tax breaks for the rich?
Precisely. URLs are not secrets. Browser plug-ins can leak them, they get logged in every proxy's log files, they show up on people's screens, they get emailed in the clear, they get bookmarked, they are easily sniffed...
I was talking about a different sort of flexibility. The ability to spin up another instance identical to this one if you suddenly need more capacity. The ability to spin up instances to do some data crunching, then turn them off when done, so you only pay for what you use.

If the capacity you need is fixed and known it will be cheaper to get a dedicated server. Here's a a counter example. I once worked for an online retailer and we got an order of magnitude more traffic at christmas. With a dedicated server we had to pay for the capacity needs of christmas all year. On the cloud we could add capacity for xmas and then turn off hte extra capacity the rest of the year. It was a lot cheaper.
First AIMA, now this.

Today seems like the "3rd Edition of a computing classic" day: someone please post a link to new Essentials of Programming Languages, in its 3rd Edition :-)
If anyone is interested in learning more about K and Q, the best tutorial I found came from a third party - http://gbkr.com/subjects/q/index.html
I guess he never really had to work with Office or Outlook, or otherwise he would have known their advantages.

Firing him was just a logical consequence, since he didn't seem to do an awful lot of work.
That contradicts a lot of sentiment on HN.

I define risk as the unknown part of the equation. In that sense, startups (particularly the customer development types) are in the business of flushing out risk through validation before action.

Where is Microsoft making more risks than Facebook?

Zune, Bing, Maps, whatever that table-top display technology is, etc etc. These are all risks insofar as they are outside of MSFT's original core competency, which I understand to be operating systems.

They are quite conservative about the cash cows.

Facebook isn't conservative with their cash cow? Are they revolutionizing online advertising somewhere that I'm not looking? All I can see is targeted banners. Looks very conservative to me.
I read your story. Here are my thoughts.

The good: you actually wrote it (well, the first half of it). It flows well from a plot perspective (something happens, then something else happens, with good pacing). And you asked for criticism, which is important.

Which brings me to the bad: the grammar is poor (see tsestrich's comment). The setting is not realistic or believable. One thousand years have passed since the present day, but the only obvious difference between then and now is that there are pretty capable robots. Your character is still downloading web pages, putting them in a database, and processing them with Lisp. In an era with AI computers so advanced battles have been fought and won over civil rights for them, how does that make sense?

You also tend to explain things a lot - there are a lot of sentences in parentheses with explanatory information. Good sci-fi tends to leave a lot for the reader to figure out, because otherwise the world does not feel like a natural place that the characters are inhabiting. In other words, it feels like you are writing the setting for a play, rather than immersing the reader in a novel.

Your metaphors also need work. Your character has a nightmare where he is lost in a grid of big, black machines. He "ran and ran and ran like a race horse" to try and escape the grid. This does not strike me as an appropriate metaphor for this particular nightmare (not to mention that it is debatable whether horse-racing will be a popular sport in 3065).

I think you need to read a lot more fiction, and keep practising your writing. I think it's great that you've asked for criticism and I can't fault you for your courage!
Grow a spine and stop working if payment is late, even by one day.
Without addressing aquifer depletion, which is a real problem in places like Australia(1), his assertion that distribution is the true difficulty doesn't really hold water.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Artesian_Basin#Water_sour...
Thanks for the link, looks like good ideas. I'll see what possible engagement there is there.

The thing about the GNU project now -- speaking for myself, not for the project -- is that we have a few hundred really good hackers, and we're done making a Unix clone. We need something new. This kind of thing sounds like a good direction.
The is really another anti-anti-iPhone appstore article.
280 Atlas Introductory Screencast
If it is available in the US: try the Settlers of Catan card game. It is actually much better than the board game, but it is for 2 players only.

Personally I prefer Carcassonne to Catan.

The Catan Dice game is actually also pretty funny. A clever variation of another famous game principle that does not require too much thinking. I like how they milk the trademark but still come up with quality ideas.
My main concerns are securing a file so only certain designated users can see it. And, yes, someone iterating through them would be bad also!

Thanks for the tip about Google. It would be unacceptable for Google to index these files.
No, as soon as you publish your infringing app, your license to distribute the app is terminated. You are not forced to provide your source code, but you are forbidden from further distribution of the GPL part, even if you then publish your own source code as GPL.

If I remember well, in the GPL version 3 there is a mechanism so that if you publish an infringing app but then correct the infringement by publishing the whole source as GPL within a certain number of days, your license to distribute the app is not terminated.
I do the same, but if you click the mode name (etc.), you get a menu from the window system.
What is a pretending object?
Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10 years ago, they would have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic position.

And that's the difference: Microsoft had a monopolistic position. Open-source doesn't, so much. What's more, open-source isn't even an organization, so it doesn't even make semantic sense to say that it could have a monopolistic position.

Google (specifically) is a different matter. If they become a monopoly, smack them down. It makes little difference to free/open-source software at large, though.
> The right way to support binary compatibility is to define a compatible, stable API and ABI and then support that ABI/API across OS releases and updates.

With that I fully agree. But I think if the last decade is any indication that in the linux world we are still at least a decade away from achieving that, even though there are plenty of efforts in that direction.

All this freedom is a mixed blessing.
Here's a businessweek slideshow.. http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/02/0212_how_to_collect/...
Or create an md5 (or sha1) hash of the file. (Salted, unless you want people to use you as a rainbow table --- I would salt it with the content type.)
Unicode combining characters.
ok, but once you start using closures everywhere someone has the bright idea to abstract most of that code into a utility function. before you know it, you're back to bind.

function _bind(o, m) {
var bound_arguments = Array.prototype.slice.apply(arguments, [2]);
return function() {
var now_arguments = Array.prototype.slice.apply(arguments);
var args = bound_arguments.slice().concat(now_arguments);
return m.apply(o, args);
}
}
By golly, you're right! I'd downvote myself if I could. Looks like I owe her an apology.
Evolutionary Theory of Humor
I guess Amazon Cloud Front is the CDN then, rather than S3 itself! :)

Whilst it seems fair to assume two UUID will almost certainly not collide, the way you pose that last question sums up my query:

If your users don't want other people peaking at their files (DropBox): yes absolutely

The answer is yes. Ultimately, users should not be able to see each others files, and from what you and other commenters are saying, UUID's on published files are still not robust enough to achieve this.

Thanks for your information.
Demand upfront payment. ;)

Failing that, make the quantum of unpaid work as small as possible. Offer them the first three hours on credit, but make them pay a bill before they get a second three hours.

Write your contracts to specify several intermediate payments. This is how, e.g., construction contractors work: one third up front, one third at the midpoint of work, one third at the end. Or something like that.

Write contracts that involve writing code and demonstrating it to the client, but stipulate that you won't deliver the final product until after you're paid.

Keep them on a very regular schedule. Don't go very far out on a limb: Don't ever let yourself get several months ahead of the paycheck. This is particularly important with the first paycheck: Don't work too much before sending the client some sort of bill -- even if it's just a partial bill -- and establishing that they will pay. For all you know, your client is a mid-level employee without signing authority who cannot pay you without permission from a higher-level manager in a rival department. Or something.

But, of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Customers run out of money. Customers turn over their personnel. Customers have internal reorganizations. Trust, but verify.
True, but that doesn't mean that they need to make the basic scroll features behave in a new way.
I understand the point, but given Apple's track record with developer relations recently I find it ironic that FSJ found this topic to riff on.
Out of the box, Tk still looks like it's ten years old. None of those "good looking" applications really fit in with the host operating system's theme either; they sort of fall into the uncanny valley of GUIs where they don't look like they're using an intentionally stylized custom theme, but they don't look native either.

It's not just the theme that makes Tk seem like an antique; there are many commonly used widgets missing also. For example, I had difficulty making an editable listbox. I googled for a while and while other people had tried to implement it, most of the implementations were glitchy and didn't work the way you'd expect them to. Given the state of Tk right now, it can be easier to just whip up a GUI in Qt or GTK+.

On the plus side, Tk does have excellent documentation.
I think it is a feature of the upcoming 4.0 version.

See this site: http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/adblo...
"Some browser plug-ins look at each url you enter and spider them" ... wow! I didn't know this.

Thanks!
He narrowed his problem domain to the one suited to parsers when he said he had a structured document. He did that when he said "HTML."

Regular expressions are a tool for extracting (semi)-structured patterns from unstructured text. For instance, it is unfortunately the case that we must treat English text as unstructured. It is not possible (at least not yet) to build a parser that will be able to correctly discern every syntactical structure in English text.

So if you want to operate on that text (suppose, slicing it into sentences) with a computer, then doing something incredibly superficial --- say, looking for periods --- is the best that can be done. It may need special casing for abbrevs., etc, but it would still produce something, even when the parser would get confused because it couldn't find the predicate of half the sentences.

Now, granted, HTML (or SGML) is not the same thing as XML. But the fact is that HTML is by definition structured. Even bad HTML is still structured.. and it's still machine-translatable because it has to be renderable by at least one browser (and therefore understandable by at least one quirks-mode SGML parser). Even the most technically incompetent designer in the world is aware that he has to load the page he's butchered into at least one browser and make sure it still renders.

Trying to use a strict XML parser on HTML will likely end in tears, because it has a different definition of validity than the quirks-mode SGML parser the designer used to check his work. But Beautiful Soup is not a strict XML parser, it's an SGML tool. One that, in my experience, is a pretty good approximation of the parsers the browsers use.
I wish this tired GPL counterpoint would be put to rest. If you provide the source code for your software, someone else will compile it and distribute a binary legally and for free.

FWIW, I contribute to an app that has been on the App Store for ~10 months now, been in the top 100 for its category since release and is open source (under a BSD license). We've had several people tell us that someone could do this very thing - compile the app and post it online for free - but it hasn't been done yet.

Of course, the app has been cracked and placed on other sites (and its technically legal since binary modifications/redistributions are allowed). But thats a different issue.
The Meaning of the Small Corporation
"In the US" doesn't help much at all. I'm a blogger and I've not been influenced by anyone on the list. This may be because my main focus is on teaching and learning, not on monetizing my blog.
The article itself actually makes a decent example. With four headers (the title header and the three sub-headers) the article is more digestible and rewarding to read since you finished four sections instead of one article. The article and this http://xkcd.com/597/ comic make a good point. I feel myself constantly distracted by news feeds and automatic updates to the point where starting and sticking with project becomes difficult. Compare this to society before radio where people had ample amount of time to create personal works simply because they had a lack of things to do. So in a way we're culling some of our deeper culture and ability to ruminate deeply. Yet at the same modern society is creating a whole new information architecture. With all these efficiencies we've created, society has been able to create a vast amount of wealth that wasn't possible before. That wealth can be used to create that deeper culture or those more sophisticate inventions; however, when bits of information can only exist in small containers will we be able to continue the progression. After all, the recently posted Eco article demands that "Culture isn't knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes."

We'll have all the pieces, but will we still have the conceptual framework to mold new ideas. Will capitalism be enough to stave off these ill effects? With increased filtering and data relationship tools capitalism may be enough to push over the plateau of stupidity this article is foretelling.
That was always the way I thought about emails in Ruby on Rails.. Multipart itself makes you focus on the "template" aspect of an email. When you're done with it, there's rarely a need to have any complicated business logic associated with the action, other than triggering or queueing the delivery.
The secret filename is not only on the wire but will show up in history and logs, which makes it a step down from basic HTTP authorization. I'd use at least digest authorization for anything that matters in any way.
As a Microsoft employee, he'd probably never used Gmail/Gdocs very much.

I've been at Google a year now, and I'm still amazed how much more productive Gmail makes me (vs Outlook) -- I'd never used it in a corporate setting.
The scroll balls on the mice in my university's library make the screen scroll up, no matter which direction you move them. It forces me to use the scroll bars, which is so annoying that I'm tempted to carry my lovely pocket mouse with me everywhere.
Black Hacking
In golf there's a lot of downtime built in which gives you time to talk, build a relationship, etc.

If you try to do this over a board game you'll just hold up gameplay. And depending on the game it can be rude to have other conversations while someone is making a move.
Re. past due accounts: Call. Every day. Be very polite, tell them that you still haven't received payment and that you'd like to know for sure that payment has been made. Repeat.

This worked flawlessly for me in the past but I did take in to account that I probably wouldn't be working for those customers ever again (and funny enough, in most cases I did, and in most cases I used these as reasons to demand up front payment on future jobs).

The squeaky wheel gets the grease...
Twelve months notice
> Microsoft could have quite legitimately just yanked the app until they could rewrite it without the GPL code.

Nope, as soon as you publish your app publically, you are forced to give the whole source code of that version of the app to anyone who downloaded the binary and asks for the source.
Don't tell anyone, but I really want to try this technique on Android. Cut-n-paste some GPL3 code from somewhere, get it accepted, wait for the binary using the code to be released, and then you can get root on your phone simply by sending a nastygram (as the GPL3 prohibits devices from locking out the user without their consent).

No more wasting time finding a security hole!

(Perhaps this has already been done!)
Or, just mention the deadline next time.
South Korea Becomes Nuclear Power Player
This is not correct; please stop upvoting mindless talking points. Nothing in the GPL or in copyright law compels infringers to divulge their source code.
I can't stop myself from reading it like free verse because of the line breaks :|
He did that when he said "HTML."

He didn't say that. There's not a single "HTML" anywhere in his question. (There's an "XHTML", but it's in the title as something he wants to exclude.)

Everyone is making that assumption on his behalf, which is my point.
ha, that's not bad, though it still has the problem of not accounting for:
- non-computer time
- conceptual activities (eg, tabbing between Eclipse, Terminal, Emacs and FF is all part of project A for these hours, and project B for those hours)

i'd love to see a blog post or open source code if your project works out. good luck.

edit: interesting you wanted to know time/wk and loc/hr

i'd be curious to know more metrics people are interested in.

personally, i like to see weekly deltas in addition to averages, as well as ratios between categories. i'm still figuring out the sweet stuff, tho. for instance, i haven't found "activity length" or "activity switching" useful, but i keep thinking it might be meaningful.

finally, i sometimes also track my subjective states, eg satisfied, motivated, anxious, down, tired. it would be interesting to detect patterns in both activity and state and then see if they correlate. the ultimate goal is to determine what i can do to promote good states or lessen down time.

i've worked on many projects in this area (mostly hobbies), including a full-time startup right now, so if this is an area you're interested in working in let me know.
Aye, though it only works when people have actually heard of the name. I had no idea who Don Dodge was.
Yes, i'm also running the Linux version aswell
"The Wire", as a premium cable drama, also had a far smaller audience than "Dallas", a broadcast soap opera.