skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft's psuedo sudo patent doesn't really cover sudo
On a recent trip to the UK I only packed my smart phone. When I was nearing my destination I needed to fire up the GPS to get me to the correct address (which was also stored in the phone together with my host's phone number). The phone however had crashed - sure it switched on but would not make any calls and could not start any applications. The only way to get it to become a working phone (at least) was to do a full re-set to factory settings - wiping out the GPS application, my contact list and all phone numbers and addresses. Good eh?

Important lesson number 1 - never rely upon a single piece of technology for anything.

Important lesson number 2 - never buy another Windows mobile based phone. As for Windows 7 - all that will do is run the battery flat even quicker.
Free Google Wave Invite Giveaway
I wouldn't call it 'Design'.
Maybe they can finally buy a text editor fir their Mac version now! Grrr
I really like Jeff Bezos, I didn't know he was such a modest, smart, and capable guy. Reading this interview has made him an inspiration to me. I like how he was so honest. From this interview, I imagine he's a great guy to work for and with.
I think Rails developers, as a community, spend too much time on "What is the right way to do this" questions when they could spend 40% of the time on "Does this way make sense?" and 60% on implementing more features for paying customers.

I do not self-identify as a Rails Programmer, so I can't speak for what they do and why. But I will say that taking the time to decide on the "right" way to do X is a win if X ever comes up again.

That is very nearly the definition of "right" as opposed to "convenient" or "pragmatic:" What way makes sense now and in the future, what way is a general pattern we can apply when the same situation and forces arise?

We often think that this won't come up in this app again, so why invest the extra energy? But in a blogging environment, when you share and discuss your idea of the right way with others, the community benefits from your work. Likewise, you benefit from others taking the time to navel-gaze over the right way to do stuff you haven't encountered yet.

Summary of my suggestion: Investing extra energy in thinking about the "right" way to do things is beneficial in a broadly collaborative and highly communicative environment like the blogosphere.
How to Avoid Being the Victim of a Crack Addict | eHow.com
It seems the submitter intended to point out the blog itself, not the top article. A better title might be "xorl %eax, %eax -- A low-level security blog".
I liked the point made by the author that other publishers are going to rejoice if News Corp pulls out of search results. They are just going to snap up those top ranking search positions really fast. We'll see an explosion of news blogs fighting over positions that used to belong to major News Corp sites.

Then when News Corp tries to get back in they are going to be crippled and have to fight their way back up through the ranks.
What safe investment pays 10%? And if you had a 4% royalty $250K in annual sales, that's $10K per year in revenue -- which you'd probably value at something much higher (maybe $50K if you thought it wouldn't keep growing; maybe $250K or more if you expected further growth).
I think people have longer attention spans now. Watch "The Wire" which is by any definition complicated and requiring a huge attention span. Now compare it to "Dallas" which at the time was considered to be too complicated for many people to follow. "The Wire" is certainly far more complicated and hard to follow. I recall watching a whole season and not knowing the names of some major characters because I just didn't have the space to store that information.

These sort of articles get written all the time too. It just seems like it's trying to appeal to an older audience who doesn't understand new technology. I'd imagine more and more newspaper readers are falling into this category.
Contrarian Excuses
Fastest Way to Lose Body Fat - Lose Weight Fast
HD Videos from Startup Bootcamp at MIT now online
A key component of my process was, after saving them a truckload or two of money, I would rigorously document what I did, how much we saved (metrics METRICS metrics), future places we could employ the technology/technique/whatever, etc

How do you generate the difference between the project that you got done with your method versus the project that wasn't done using a different method? Is it real cost of your way versus estimated cost of doing it the other way, are you re-writing a project that has already been written by a different team, or what? If the cost of the other way was an estimate, are the metrics trusted because you have a great track record with your estimates, or do you have some sort of estimate-aiding tools that your employer relies on and trusts?
I realized after it was too late to edit that I typed "Google Apps" instead of "App Engine." However, I'll check out the Google Apps add-ons as well given that my wife and I are now a "company" and share Google calendars on our Android phones.
> I think that any modern implementation should allow for identifier names and comments to be in any language. Why should the English speaking world get a free pass here, and everybody else be at a disadvantage ?

I disagree (I'm designing and implementing a language right now, as it happens). The most important quality of an identifier is that it identifies. Consider the identifier BHOCT. Does it consist of Latin letters or Cyrillic ones? You can't tell -- in many monospaced fonts, they look the same. In fact you could have 2 (or even 32) identifiers that look like BHOCT but which are all different.

Then there's the issue of recognising/recalling letters. If I see an identifier written in Latin letters, I can recognise the individual letters, keep thme in memory and write them down. If I see an identifier in a script I'm unfamiliar with, it just looks like a squiggle so I can't remember it. There are millions of people who know one of the Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Devanagari, Tamil and Hebrew scripts, but how many people know all those scripts? Very few. So for identifiers, it's best to specify one script, the one that most people who use computers worldwide are familiar with, the Latin script.

The same argument applies to domain names, which are just identifiers anyway.
I like this because it breaks binary, false dichotomies that developers usually put themselves in. We can understand why we do this - and its because things are usually right or wrong, one or zero. We usually end up getting it right in the end and thus the "geekgo" (geek-ego).

The tone of this article is great - yes the app store process probably isn't the greatest but it serves its purpose and what can we do to change it beyond opening it up completely to make 'everyone' happy?

Maybe in the future a developer will have to prove themselves worthy of being above the slow, error prone approval process by demonstrating a history of thought through code drops and minimal bugs.

Maybe the current process is suppose to give developers an incentive to get it as close to "right" as they can the first time.
The Erlang CMS - Zotonic
Pretty impressive CMS built in everyone's FAVORITE language: Erlang. At the core of this beast lives webmachine and mochiweb.
would love some elaboration
You should put a way to contact you in your profile. That'd be much more effective.
Wow.

I thought Fred Wilson thought deeper than that.

Look around you. The women in your life don't show off their apps, they show off their phones.
If what you do is sell a library of email addresses, it doesn't really matter if the emails are of likely "customers" or not they just need to be emails with someone at the other end.
We perfected our simple first product, won the market, and have nothing to do.
This is lame. The jQuery.com documentation is very good.
Ah very nice, the chess position shown on the cover appears to be the final position from game 6 of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0136042597/ref=dp_im...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_%E2%80%93_Kasparov,_1...
I stopped reading after the quote: "If our attention span constricts to the point where we can only take information in 140-character sentences, then that doesn't bode too well for our future,"

This seems like a predictable 'woe is technology & future' article.

Yes we use shorter messages and the way we write is different but if that's a problem for you then take a day off and go hike in the woods; it will do your mind wonders.
Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development
Around 75% of CS majors are INTJ. Certainly there are an infinite number of personalities, but this sizes them up pretty well.
Ask HN: Is Google Go a reinvention of the pike programming language?
Yes, but Google seems to spend more time acquiring startups, so I think his expertise isn't wasted there.
Jennifer Merolla Ph.D.: Reconsidering Public Reactions to Terrorism
Via Schneier on Security http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/public_reactio...
Falling Fertility
O'Reilly: "We're heading into a war for control of the web."
but even if any specific alarm is overblown, there is a legitimacy to the fear that the ways we're hacking our brains will ultimately result in a net loss.

"what are you doing? you haven't answered your phone for 2 days!"

"playing this game where I have to collect waddels"

"what's a waddel?"

"I don't know but I'm ranked #3 on the server"
I did a quick scan of the ICU library mentioned above (thanks for that!!) and it does handle these things. http://userguide.icu-project.org/i18n
My email is there...what else should I do?
China joins supercomputer elite
"we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. "

The argument makes a lot of sense, but why is Amazon in this list? It is true that Amazon is in the war for control. But that war is for control of the data center, not for control of the web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
Sure, in the authors' random and unrealistic model with arbitrary assumptions...
Tk ugly? It looks fine to me
Great information; thanks!!! The ICU library looks very comprehensive, but I hope it's not too bureaucratic to use. :)
how can they have numbers on a counter factual (loosen up review app -> more revenue)?
Tool of the Day: Illustrations made easy with Creately
This probably explains why "Top Ten" articles are so popular on the internet these days.

People like getting information fed to them in lists.
Strategies on How To Motivate Users to Sign Up Through Design
We are using IDs on our website instead of hard-coded variables. It causes no end of problems. A non-exhaustive list:

1. Using variables to put numbers in the string. Singular and plural are not always only two options. Rules in this regard can get quite complex. gettext has this solved by using rules: n%2 == 0? Use A. n==0? Use B. n%2 == 1? Use C. etc. That should give you an idea about complexity.

2. Replacing words into the string is nearly impossible due to declensions.

3. Names. When using a different script, will the name be transliterated? Do the names need to be inflected? Will they be handled correctly when changing writing direction?

3a. Names have a whole load of problems anyway. The "given name" isn't always the first name. The surname isn't always the most important one. Some people don't have family names, some people have two or more. Some people have double-barrelled given names. Etc.

4. Ordinals differ greatly from language to language.

5. String length can mess up your layout. A good translator can help by using different idiom, but sometimes it's just not possible.

6. Layout expectations are different when the writing system is right-to-left. You also need to learn the details of Unicode's direction algorithm, because you will encounter situations where it doesn't work properly without guidance.

These are just some problems we've actually encountered when using multiple languages.
U.S. arrests and charges two Madoff programmers
Social media can drive Holiday sales - great news for struggling retailers
Turning an object into an array isn't a nice way to do things IMHO. Maybe runtimes optimize for these cases, or maybe they create completely new objects every time and you get fantastic object churn.

Yes it works well, but it's not really necessary. It's inefficient wasted effort.

I guess it's fun to make lovely APIs, but that doesn't help people who just want their js to run fast.
I second the much mentioned idea of building timeless/technology independent skills. For example, use pure SQL as much as possible in your T-SQL procedures - this experience will transfer nicely to Postgres, Oracle, DB2, etc. Course, you'll have to convince employers that it transfers, but techies will know if you speak it or not.

Experiment with small pieces when you can. I'm working on learning a bit about REST programming with Ruby for a small web app/service I'm deploying at work. For someone who has been a back-end code guy, playing with the web frontend is . . . interesting.
Google does not strike me as the kind of company where hiring decisions are made on anything other than the merits. Just try interviewing there if you want to see for yourself.
Because Twitter's m.twitter stylesheet is so simple, users flock to iphone apps
Windows 7 migration: Don't rush the prep work
"You can choose up to a 7-inch screen, 5 megapixel camera, 120 GB hard drive and up to 64 GB of memory"

Wha? That's not a cell phone, that's a tablet. You can't comfortably hold a 7" screen in one hand (excluding those with massive hands of course), and you definitely can't put it away in your pocket.
Sheesh. Apparently being sceptical of a geologist's theory that water (even a lot of water) spilling into the north atlantic 'sent water rushing into the Persian Gulf' is worthy of downvotes.

Anyone care to explain how that speculation could possibly not be laughable?

Meanwhile the "gee golly jeepers" response above gets upvoted 6?

Ah who cares (me a little, apparently).
Sweet, looking forward to anything you're able to work out. :) My contact info is in my profile, keep in touch!
I like this idea of "tiered" mailing times... I'm going to try to A/B test this sometime this week and see how it affects account signups.
Arrington on CrunchPad: "...big news on that, shortly."
I agree. The first time I saw the Google wave scrollbar I thought that it was a visual glitch because it looked like the scrollbar had somehow floated outside the frame.

And the most disturbing thing in my opinion is that using my mouse's scroll wheel is very laggy, especially on longer waves. I would much rather they let the browser handle scrolling and scroll bars naturally. It would be much more efficient.
As I mentioned above, do not ignore the shared memory which gets reported as part of the resident size: yes, gnome-terminal uses 9MB of RAM, but 7MB of those are shared libraries like clib, glib, gtk, cairo, freetype - they are all used by the rest of the system and only a single copy of each is loaded, yet counted as part of the shared size for all processes that use it.

However, I do agree with your arguments: pushing data around, that's all computers mostly do: from one cache to another, from a hard drive to the controller cache then to disk buffers to application memory then to CPU cache and then backwards. Fewer bytes == faster.

Unfortunately for us, the progress here goes backwards and most languages people like to use are not capable of integrating into OS memory management and playing nicer with OS binary loader. VM-based languages like Java and Python will clone their entire VM for each started process, i.e. gnome-terminal rewritten in Java or Ruby will probably eat 20-40MB as opposed to 2-3MB it does now. And Ubuntu is encouraging this - they already have Mono-based Tomboy which launches an entire Mono stack all for itself and they have a couple of tiny Python-based applets to monitor printing jobs, wasting about 10MB each.
Awesome! I can't wait to start going through these later today. Thanks for the link.
I think it is incumbent on each of us, practitioners of this craft, to take responsibility for our own education in this field.

Vendors of software have an interest in what you learn, as it helps their products work better. And it can be useful to you as well. But if you rely on vendors to set your horizons, it won't necessarily work to your enlightened self interest.

Additionally, employers are not always going to have the same objective regarding what you learn. A medium or large company is interested in getting their projects done on a likely slipping schedule. They are not necessarily going to be aligned with your educational self-interest.

One defense against this is to see what other vendors are offering. If you are working on SQL Server learn what you can about how Oracle does things. If you are working in .net, learn a bit about Java (although that is not exactly a vendor-driven environment in the same way).

Another step is to look outside the vendor-influenced areas. Look at how things are done in the open source world. Understand some of the ideas behind the nosql movement. What is hadoop? memcached? For some of the technologies discussed on HN (which is certainly filled with talk of more recent technologies), dive into some of them a little. Expand your comfort zone.

If you have spent a lot of time in the OO world, check out some of the functional languages and why they might solve some problems more easily than the OO approach.

And perhaps find an interesting open source project and read lots of code.

I have been in the business several decades and am still learning new things constantly. While this sounds like a lot, perhaps develop a habit or routine of doing a little of this each day. If you have in your mind the goal of expanding your technical horizons, then you will see opportunities to learn.
A raytracer in 7 lines of 'K'
jbert, you are not wrong, vmem includes everything. But shared libs have a much higher chance to be in the working set simply because multiple processes are using them. I doubt that clib or any of GTK ever get swapped, so it is safe to assume that on most non-starved systems "real" memory consumption = RES-SHR.
we could use http://www.freesideatl.org as a meeting place
There is only one definition of heritability used in biology, and it's the one I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability#Definition

Your implication that it's disingenuous that the layman's definition differs from the scientist's definition... is dumb.

And again, I didn't say that personality was immutable. I said that part of it was. Longitudinal studies show that a correlations of personality across an individual's lifetime is about .83, which is pretty damn high. http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev....

There are a billion and a half studies on this, and heritability estimates range between 20-45% for different personality traits being tested. http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0070366055/student_vie...
Hobbes in Hebrew: The Religion Question
STOP BLAMING THE CANADIANS!
Disclaimer: I'm don't do any web software at all, I work on embedded devices.

We use IDs and I've not seen too many of the problems you mention. I will, however, agree that the string length can cause serious problems for a layout. We tend towards using very flexible UI designs where the UI elements resize and reposition themselves a long with the strings. However, UI design isn't as stylish for embedded devices so we get let off easy here. One of the biggest problems we have with our newer developers is that they don't know how to write their UIs so that they can easily re-arrange themselves for our various languages. Also, the Left and Right layout changes are all part of our look and feel engine.

I wonder if some of these problems are specific to web applications and some of the 'fancier' UI designs that we don't use? I don't actually know enough about the differences between the two to say.
Google New York: Scooters, Slides, And Legos -- Oh My
Any scientist knows that pretty much all data is inaccurate, especially those that rely on survey. (one-fifth smiley)
You are right - what we are talking about here is a notebook PC. My notebook already has most of that stuff - even (via a little dongle) a SIM and access to 3G networks. So - is the article suggesting adding true phone sims to a notebook type device?
Steelworkers' union to set up worker-owned co-ops
Yes. That would be the entire point of my comment.
The only not ugly code is the code you are working on right now. A month after ceasing to work on it, you'll think it's ugly too.
Fits in well with this recent story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 about it being time for personal servers.

Just like I can run my own blog on my own server with Wordpress instead of needing to have it hosted on Wordpress.com, I wish someone would release an open source webmail client of equivalent quality to Gmail that could be installed on personal servers, would also support XMPP, etc.

Same for other cloud software now. Why not offer it as an upfront purchase price, plus a continuing support contract, with the software running on hardware that the end user has ultimate control over.
Future of High school exams
Jammit: Industrial Strength Asset Packaging for Rails
Quick Summary:
We just open-sourced the asset packager that powers the DocumentCloud prototype. It does the asset concatenation and (YUI) compression that you'd expect, as well as ahead-of-time gzipping, built-in support for JavaScript templates, and automatic Data-URI/MHTML image embedding.

Quick Links:
Project Page: http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/
Source Code: http://github.com/documentcloud/jammit
Image Embedding Example: http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/jammit_example/normal.html

We'd love to expand the gem beyond just Rails, although it's a bit out of scope for us. Patches to add Sinatra support, for example, will be warmly welcomed.
In the UK, some of the mobile phone shops are already selling netbooks with SIM card slots in the bottom for direct access to mobile broadband.
Quick Summary: We just open-sourced the asset packager that powers the DocumentCloud prototype. It does the asset concatenation and (YUI) compression that you'd expect, as well as ahead-of-time gzipping, built-in support for JavaScript templates, and automatic Data-URI/MHTML image embedding.

Project Page: http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/

Source Code: http://github.com/documentcloud/jammit

Image Embedding Example: http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/jammit_example/normal...

We'd love to expand the gem beyond just Rails, although it's a bit out of scope for us. Patches to add Sinatra support, for example, will be warmly welcomed.
Did anyone else notice that Eco was bad at answering the guy's questions? When he asks him about Homer straying from poetry, Eco goes on about something else entirely.
I agree, we may be doing things to our brains that are irreversible but I also believe that it's something that we can control and manage.

I used to be an obsessive everquest player but am not anymore because I realized how unhealthy it is. Albeit, that's one small anecdote.

I think the real takeaway here, and I can't say if this article addressed it (because I refuse to read this) is that we as conscious beings have to take time to be self-aware and regulate our activities in a healthy way.

IE Eat your fruits and veggies, exercise, don't smoke, wear seatbelts, don't watch too much TV, spend a limited amount of time on computers, get outside, meditate, play music or draw, explore, expand and be creative and don't read too many alarmist articles.