skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That might work for them because they are using the builtin webkit engine - but you can do the same by controlling IE via OLE, and unlike the method used in the article it is no different from a user who browsed with IE normally.
"I know it's ridiculous that at some point programmers may figure out that languages are largely irrelevant, but I hope it happens one day."

One can't "figure out" that which isn't true ;P

As a proponent of language-oriented programming I can only disagree strongly with your statement. Languages are supremely relevant. However it is true that with respect to a specific problem, the expressive difference between almost any two general-purpose languages pales in comparison to the difference between a general-purpose language and a domain-specific language specifically tailored to the task at hand.

In my as-of-yet-unreleased Common Lisp web framework, I have DSLs for:

- HTML ("building", rewriting and outputting)
- CSS (building and outputting)
- Form validation
- Error message specification and customization
- Declarative configuration management (loading and dumping, eventually modifying too)
- and probably others I'm forgetting at the moment, plus a bunch of others I'm planning to do

I'm sure Java has equivalent stuff, the problem is that their solution has to fit in a rigid mold (object-oriented, java syntax) so there's a lot of cognitive resources wasted in translating back and forth between your mental model of what you want to do and how you must express it in Java.
Cynical comment about the title: an easy way to convince other members of the site that you're smart?
Raymond's point about people at the top not needing to to self-promote is something I've heard described many times before. I would call it trite, actually, but my googling is failing me so I can't find examples to back that up.

One very eloquent description I've seen is "The luxury of humility." Basically, a guy like Einstein had the luxury to declare himself horrible at math (for example) because his reputation as a physicist and mathematician was so solid that nothing he said could possibly dent it. Instead, any self-deprecation he did would simply bolster his reputation for humility.

An unproven physicist, on the other hand, would not be advised to mimic Einstein in declaring himself bad at math because people would be more likely to take it seriously and dismiss his work as probably containing errors.

That said, Eric Raymond used to annoy me, then he became this sort of perversely amusing thing (about the time ELER was running). Now I have to say that I can't read this kind of stuff without feeling sorry for him. He's a textbook example, or at least his writing is, of false bravado vainly trying to mask almost limitless amounts of insecurity.
Wayyyy too many options in this poll. The idea of a poll is that a relatively quick glance will get you answers, not a 'bounce'.

On the topic, however... I think it will be destructive to online business, from what I've read on it. I'm all for user privacy, but there has to be a middle ground in order for the wheels to keep on turning.

This whole law smacks of a group of people ignorant of the ramifications of the action making the decision.
I don't think so. I think getting people talking about the same topics in an environment where the books are always around will probably actually drive sales. Especially questions like "What language should I use for (X)?" "Oh, use (Rails|PHP|ASP.NET MVC)!" "Cool, I'll go grab a book on that..."

It probably won't drive a huge spike in sales, but I really doubt it'll hurt them.
I voted for Bob Barr simply because I believe the Fair Tax needs recognition. We should do away with the complexities even at the cost of jobs. The IRS employees could be put to use in other parts of the government, and H&R Block could focus more on accounting than simply paying people to use their software that anyone at home could use by themselves.
makecheck, I agree. I almost had a paragraph talking about that, but cut it for length.

There's a general UI principle here: Only present the user with choices they need and want to make. Software, like an efficient employee, can and should make some decisions on its own, only consulting the user when they can make choices better than the software.
In one class during college, we had a social science student (probably a psych major) come visit our class. She was researching why we "didn't have a sense of humor."

We laughed.
Same here. I used Win 95 through XP without ever installing AntiVirus or AntiSpyware, and I never had malware.
I want to say a lot of things but right now, all I can say is supercool.
Predictably Irrational and StackOverflow Careers
Short answer is: no, not at the moment.

MongoDB & CouchDB have a lot more history as open source project. Riak, being recently released into the wild, will have its various how-tos and documentation grow in time.

But lets say you wanted to do a blog in python, the client libs they provide are pretty well documented inline. Check it out: http://bitbucket.org/justin/riak/src/tip/client_lib/jiak.py
This also happens when you upgrade to a new version of a programming language or operating system. You start to use features that previously did not exist or restructure your code to utilize such features. However, many times this is a great benefit to help with the readability of the code. I have done this myself with hardware and software.
I have a much simpler proposal:

Let's abolish all patents, both on software and 'regular' ones for a 50 year period and then re-evaluate, if it led to more innovation then we'll keep it, if not we will go back to the old system.

Simple A/B testing. I highly doubt that the lobby would go for it though...
European Commission objects to Sun-Oracle deal
It doesn't just break behavioral targeting, it breaks conversion tracking. Most campaigns are run with Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) goals, regardless of how they're priced (CPM vs CPC, etc). Figuring out actual CPA depends on being able to match up conversions with ads being served. In most cases, campaigns are being run across multiple ad networks, so you can't just look at total conversions and divide by all impressions.

The process for doing this relies on being able to set a cookie when the ad is served and read the cookie back on the landing page for the conversion. Taking away the ability to track conversions will set the online advertising industry back significantly, which is why the major opposition to legislation like this comes from advertising companies.
Ask HN: Does anyone have recommendations for a web based kb/help docs system?
I'm looking to move away from our current help system solution - where we use clunky (won't name names) software to generate html/xml files of content/indexes that we then upload. It then adds basic searching. It is a beast to update, and the JS that powers it weighs in at nearly 2 megs.

I've been looking at http://68kb.com/. Has anyone used it? Does anyone have other, similar software to recommend? php based/mysql database is what I'm looking for, ideally.
What does Riak do over CouchDB or MongoDB?

Clarification: even if it doesn't, that does not mean it's not a worth while project. Competition is always good, imo :)
More broadly, a software store with automatic updates on the Windows-PC platform could be huge.
The 10,226.94-Point Dow Just Doesn't Matter
These people need to stop talking and start buying oil futures.
...that you knew about.
That is good and all, but does little when the badware steals your passwords to your online bank.
This has very little to do with login cookies or site cookies. All major sites will just add more to their terms of service. The real problem is online advertising. I left a comment with more detail on first post about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933371
News distribution network
Detecting the body text of an article is a very simple task when you look at it from the point of view of a human being, but it is surprisingly hard to do it reliably.

I have little program that will do this with some level of reliability but it needs a very large automated test to be run after even minor changes because it will go off the rails and regress in a heartbeat.

That's one of the things I really underestimated, I thought that would be an absolutely trivial problem, something I could solve in an evening or so. You know that feeling :)
Would shakespeare have been terrible if he had written everything in french?

Personally, I don't think so.
What is http://packages.python.org/? I hadn't heard of it before.
What does email have to do with opening Word documents with macro viruses? What does email have to do with opening any data file that maliciously exploits the application opening the data file?

How can a whitelist prevent attack vectors as varied as opening a PDF file designed to exploit your PDF reader? The user cannot always be vigilant enough to know that site X is giving him a malicious file to open. Hell, site X might actually be a legitimate site that has itself been attacked and exploited...
Their choice to use cloud services makes perfect sense. It will enable them to create new servers on the fly, when required, as well as resizing and allocating resources as needed, keeping costs down and efficiency high.

It inspires me that we have these cloud services at our disposal. And maybe Posterous (and many other great startups) would not have been conceived without the founders having access to such technology.
Well, it's early in the morning and I might come to my senses later, but what the hell, the Internet's got a lot of free space: http://shitmydadsaysexplained.tumblr.com/

I promise you within four entries you'll never be able to read SMDS without breaking it down into components, and the humor will be lost, and you'll hate me forever.
When did you qualify what it is better for? (Better than what?)
Twitter-LI tag team, Shatner the salesman, Netflix's sold soul tidbits:
Yeah, the direct comparison in the title and opening paragraph seems to be pure SEO, as the reasoning behind Rackspace > AWS is never elaborated on at all.
Python Course in Bioinformatics
Really makes you wonder who he's trying to impress with all that.

And at $300 / hour he's having a whole population of lawyers laugh at him to boot...
Would he have done as well in a language that didn't have adjectives or adverbs?
Riak is actually a distributed datastore, where as CouchDB & MongoDB are replication based.

For example, there are no special nodes in Riak and no one node has all the data. When a node joins a riak cluster, it begins to share and participate in the cluster.

CouchDB replicates the entire dataset from to another, in MongoDB you need to do sharding (which will be implemented in the 1.1 release from what I understand).

Both are Couch & Mongo are pretty awesome kv stores, but neither implement a distributed datastore like Riak (or Cassandra).
News distribution network 
http://graphicnews20.blogspot.com/
And you can't even say "Any 'good' application is only going to do certain sorts of actions. We'll scan those and if the application does something else, stop it". UAC in Windows 7 and Vista went a long way to making this better, at least if you're opening yourself to malware you usually have to click "I know this is doing something which could be dangerous", and 7 went a step farther by making it far more un-obtrusive so that users are less likely to auto-click it.

Its still a losing battle though. Run http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.asp... for a few minutes, and look at how many actions are being taken, just when your computer is supposedly idle. Trying to whitelist each and every one of those would be massive overhead.

I've found (personally, this isn't for everyone) is to run with as minimal AV as possible (Right now, SSE), and if I notice anything out of the ordinary run an offline virus scan. I usually do this with Bart-PE, although I've been working on another method for it. Expecting an infected OS to report that it is infected isn't the best idea, it is too easy to fake the results. Doing a scan of the system while the OS is not running tends to be more reliable and remove any problems a lot easier. I'm currently working on a system which will PXE boot once a month, do a virus scan or two (with different, fully updated scanners), defrag, checkdisk and do a general cleanup.
It's PyPI. They allow you to host static files for documentation now. The URI would be http://packages.python.org/package_name.
CompuServe described GIF, and then Gershon Elber and I made an open-source implementation that became ubiquitous

Worth noting that multiple years span the time between when Elber actually wrote giflib and when ESR added 2 functions and 3 utilities to it.
The best way to reverse the obesity epidemic is via an old invention called the bicycle.
That looks really nice - I like it. I've used Cerberus Help Desk in the past and it was nice. ZenDesk, Kayako, Helpspot, and more fill this gap. Check out this past link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404963
How is cross system locking of nodes handled? To write or read, do all nodes need to be in sync?
How green is your pet?
That article has a funny typo in it: "it's MsSql database, which it bought for $1 billion last year, is used to run popular websites including Google, Facebook and Amazon."

Anyway, let's hope they stick to it, that might mean that if they drop mysql and make it independent again that the deal will go through.

And I never knew that google used MySql for their engine, that really rocked my world. All that misdirection involving map-reduce and the GFS, brilliant strategy.
I suppose if it is unnoticed, it is symbiosis -- like those hordes of bacteria (and viruses?) that live within and without all humans. (Assuming any remote harm would be noticed too.)
Default Usename and Password for All Routers
Nice graph. Everything going swimmingly - until tomorrow, when the sky falls.
The EU needs to die right now. Hopefully we (UK) will not be part of it for much longer.
This reminds me of a YouTube video I saw a while back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiLoANg6nNY

I assume it's fake though... if only because that's my default position on these things!
Thanks - those looks pretty nice, but we already have separate support ticketing/live support chat systems, all of which are integrated separately on their own into our app. We're just looking for a simple KB system like 68KB. I just wonder if there are others out there...
I haven't yet used Rackspace cloud services, but from reading the documentation, I do like that they integrate a persistent file system with compute units (whatever they call them). Compare with EC2 and separate EBS volumes:

I used to spend a lot of time with EC2 deployments dealing with attaching EBS volumes, then starting services that required the EBS volumes (though I finally got this down pat).
Another look at how jobs data and unemployment are calculated
Why we didn’t convert to .Net. And perhaps we never will
I really enjoyed his Javascript credit card generator page. It says, "This is just an example for educational purposes. Don't use these numbers for anything ever," and is surrounded by A LOT of Google AdSense boxes. It's practically contemporary art.
"lower the price and caloric content of food by lowering distances food must travel, from the farm to the dinner table"

So the farther food travels, the more calories it acquires. Interesting, didn't know that. Does it also work if I pick up a banana and jog around the block? Could save me a lot of money.

What also surprises me that people seem to prefer long-traveled food to short-traveled food, even though the long-distance food is supposedly more expensive.
That's not a good comparison. You can do anything in any turing complete language. They're all equally expressive. If the language isn't expressive enough, make it so.
This is definitely written like a tech review, not a car review.

The sort of minor interior refresh Tesla did is not uncommon for larger car companies to do every year or two. The complete redesign that happens every five to eight years is a lot more complete than what Tesla has done.

Also, a big weight toward the rear of the car will (all else equal) lead to oversteer. (To the uninitiated, understeer = "I missed the turn", oversteer = "I spun out"). A little oversteer is what you want in a sports car, but that can be adjusted pretty easily by tuning the anti-roll-bar stiffness. Most cars from the factory are tuned to understeer slightly, as most consumers who lose control of their car expect to leave the road facing forwards and not backwards.
I'm not sure I can say how awful that site is.

To focus on one thing, nearly all of the current posts appear to be snippets taken from their books, with prominently placed ads below. These are not questions: they're just advertisements. (I also wonder if the authors were asked about the use of their work in this way.) The posts that aren't by authors are by editors or other O'Reilly employees. The thing is sheer astroturfing, not a QA site.

It's sad to see a company that does something so well (their books are generally excellent) so desperate to capture every market. They feel a bit like Starbucks a few years ago.
Regardless, us readers win ;)
It's the 'keeping costs down' bit that I have a problem with, I have to date not found any evidence that that is the case.

Whether you lease or buy your servers, if you have a > 30% 'on' pattern and use anything but trivial bandwidth then using a cloud instead is very expensive.

Sure you can instantly call up more instances, but there are only a limited number of cases for which that is true, and almost none of them involve web based services (which are pretty much 'on' all the time, with some fluctuations because of the day/night shift).
Its the carbs making us fat... read Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories". The medical/nutrition profession really have egg on their face and can't yet admit their error.
Are you familiar with the CAP theorem? You can't have all three, but you can have 2. Most distributed datastores, pick for you which two of the three you'll get.

One of Riak's goals is to make the choice transparent to the user per document and let's the user select which they want. There's some more information about that on their website: http://riak.basho.com/cap.html

EDIT: this is good info about it too http://riak.basho.com/nyc-nosql/
Your Work Habits and the Happiness Treadmill
How to get the audience involved in your public speech
The Accidental Cron Job (Podcast)
S3 is fairly much awesome. Has anyone here ever lost data in S3 (not counting human/admin errors)? I've twice had issues with EBS volumes, but never with S3. Also, at least for my applications, S3 is so cheap.

Anyway, I may get bit by this someday, but I infrequently back up what I keep in S3.
As on as I have bit more spare time I will definitely go and play with this stuff.

Oh, and this baby also still needs some work:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/buildings/eygelshoven/dscf1379....
Einstein was certainly a great physicist, but not a mathematician. He was really bad at math, it wasn't false modesty.
> The thing is sheer astroturfing, not a QA site.

When reddit launched, nearly all the posts were by reddit devs or YC insiders. Give it time to see if the model takes off among external users.
Pretty much, yeah.

I say this as a man who could stand to use a good 40 lbs if I'm being generous... more like 60 if I'm being honest.
>Any 'good' application is only going to do certain sorts of actions
Like delete files, read files, contact websites, read keyb, send email?

There might also be naughty reasons to do these things
Stay Connected with Free Airport Wi-Fi from Google this Holiday Season
Really? I always thought it was the Glycemic Index of foods that make us fat.
From the comments:

> Stack Overflow will make both Spolsky and Atwood enormously wealthy, based upon the volunteer efforts of others. Who will get nothing.

The others won't get nothing. They'll get whatever rewards go along with participating in a forum: the opportunity to demonstrate prowess and be recognized for it, the chance to have specific questions answered in a peer-reviewed medium, and so on. Don't discount the value that people place in these things, even if they aren't being compensated financially.
Why do you need real time scanning?

You download an app/email attachment etc, check it and then install/open it.
Humans tend to assume that their experiences are normative, and are surprised to see instances where their experiences are not shared. As a personal example, my friends are usually significantly shocked to learn I haven't seen the movie "The Boondock Saints". Yet they think nothing of the fact that they haven't seen Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", which I have. Our values are informed by our experiences, so we also tend to assume our values are shared by others.

Assuming one's values are normative leads to assuming that the fact they aren't reflected in the world must be the result of some external entity, a secret society, or this nebulous "the system". Instead, if one assumes that one's views aren't normative, then it is clear why one's views are not reflected in the world in aggregate: it's a simple tautology. Occam's Razor applies.

"The system" is not an entity unto itself, it is intractable from the people within it, it is nothing more than the people within it. The "invisible hand of the market" is merely a short-hand, anthropomorphizing term for "the aggregate activity of the people within the poorly defined borders of 'the market'." If something isn't a particular way, it's because "most people" demonstrably do NOT concede your point, or if they do, do not assign such great importance to it as to warrant change.

I don't like that elderly care personnel are paid less than middle managers either, but I'm not suggesting to force everyone else to make that valuation. When you say, "we as a society have to find a way...", and if you are suggesting that way be via government intervention, then really you're saying, "I want to force everyone else in society to pay for my way..." (undemocratic, even totalitarian). Then we have to write a new tax code to pay for it, and we get this situation here in the OP. If instead you are suggesting that you will live by example and proselytize to your fellow man to do the same, then really you're using "the invisible hand of the market" to enact the change you desire.
Also - I wonder if there were any incentives. From past experience I know that such companies will give huge discounts and sometimes free service to bring such brands on board.
I think the detection of virus signatures is a failing strategy. I have seen computers that I know are infected and scanning with multiple products leaves some of the bugs undetected. That said, it would be pretty stupid to run Windows today without a scanner. AVG and (believe it or not) Microsoft's Essential Security are good and free. The two major problems with virus scanners is that they bog the machine down. (AVG is starting to do this). The other problem, and I see this from all brands, they can detect a virus but cannot remove it. This is a serious problem today because it then requires an expensive tech visit to manually remove a virus.
7 habits of highly motivated coworkers (and why you hate them)
Well, I liked the article - I have worked through the real world haskell book just enough to sort-of understand this article :-)

That said, I gave up on Haskell. I spend a lot of time semi-learning languages because it is fun. But, for practicality, I really concentrate on knowing just Ruby, Common Lisp, and Java very well.

Striking a good balance between practicality and having fun is not so easy to do.
What type of companies would O'Reilly be interested in acquiring?
I've just started using Trac after some hints here (I wanted a self-hosted solution), and it comes with a built in wiki.