skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless you've got a unique selling proposition, that is. Murdoch doesn't.

A magazine like Cook's or the Economist can charge for access, because they offer writing that's leagues beyond the norm. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, is a good paper, by it offers nothing that I can't find elsewhere. It's certainly not a Top 5 news source for me. So people likely won't notice if the WSJ disappears from Google.

Murdoch is smart, one of the brightest men alive, but here for the first time in decades he's met a system smarter than he is. On a level playing field he's a shark, but he is no longer a holder of a primary source of power. I forget who wrote yesterday that the Internet isn't about content, it's about access nodes, but they were spot-on. Murdoch can crush wtb content, but he doesn't own nodes and he doesn't understand them.
it sounds like they used to use aws, specifically s3. why did they switch? performance? cost?
How Credit Card Numbers Are Generated
Java definitely supports generics as of 1.5 - did you mean that it doesn't support generics to the extent of C++? Most basic uses (containers) are identical between the languages, and while Java doesn't allow compile-time "duck typing" that C++ does, you can fake it by using the "? extends SomeInterface" syntax.
I believe he's referring to the fact that he was at one time the maintainer of giflib (or libgif) and that he contributed some code to libpng. Since these are, he claims, vital to all those items you mention then we are all using his code.
It's a lot like everything. I haven't found any skill or talent where that isn't true.

Keeping this in mind is the first step towards a reasonable self-assessment.
Well, no matter how controlled the internal market for Facebook and the iPhone are, they compete in external markets as well and in order to stay relevant, they have to allow games. Ergo, consumers win.
Good catch! Very occasionally I've noticed dupes I couldn't figure out. I didn't check for trailing whitespace.
It would be nice to see their rationale for using cloud services at all, their use case seems to be much better served by leasing a bunch of servers.
I think you just scanned the article.

Rule 1: My code is crap ... this means exactly what you are saying ... there are always better ways to do it, and when a problem arises it's probably your fault more often than not.

Rule 2: I care about my code ... programmers definitely should care about their code, but should care even more about their current projects. There, happy?

Rule number 3: My opinion about my own code is wrong ... this happens more often than you think, and not realizing that your mental model might be wrong is dangerous.

Rule number 4: My manager doesn't care about my code, and he pays me ... this is the norm. You're arguing semantics here.

The manager cares about the project. You could argue that the manager indirectly cares about the quality of your code, and you would be right, but then again I haven't seen many managers getting upset about a project with lots of duct-tape code, as long as it does the job.
Pysistence:  persistent data structures for Python
I like the idea that merely posting this essay is an act of ESR-bashing. I agree, but think it's warranted.
So, the guy who wrote libc strpbrk() then: an industry titan?

(Thanks for the answer though --- I think you're right).
The art of the English language...

'stray' indeed ;)

Flagged, good call.

It looks like the dupe detector needs a minor bug fix.
"building your small web app on top of the cloud infrastructure is essentially a case of premature optimization."

Ah, I thought it was the opposite... at first you use the cloud to take advantage of the infrastructure at a low cost and with much less management and then when you get big you start hosting your own stuff because it's cheaper and it's worth it. (I'm ignorant on those matters)
> You haven't looked hard enough :-) I'm sure there's quite a bit of stuff I'd be ashamed of today.

Self-awareness is key to improving. If you're not ashamed of at least a fraction of your code, you're deluded.

Invariably the most talented people are those painfully aware of their own flaws and shortcomings.
Bioplastics Man
Does it really update signatures every 5 minutes?

Seems a bit excessive.
Perhaps having well-formed XML is handy for, say, checking the markup.
I have always wondered what is so special about CVV numbers. It has been so widely popularized by checkout systems that by now everybody would be knowing what CVV number is. No?
A proposal on patent reform
That's a technical problem, nothing more. At the moment of sending off the message to the company you could post your message digest to a secure server somewhere.
MIT researchers think America's obesity epidemic can be reversed via ‘foodsheds’
Competence has to begin from something. Even the best hackers wrote ugly, buggy code when they were young. You gain competence by improving from your mistakes, but how can you improve if you don't recognize that your previous code was crap?
I remember the days when cvv/cvc was not asked for by websites. These 'credit card number generators' were in huge demand and sold for a lot of cash. Of course you could always dig around and get them for free.

The latest of these programs was written in vb4, which I could decompile to look at the source (the algorithm wasn't easily available then).
Driving a car with an iPhone.
Learn Riak, A Fully Distributed, Erlang-Based Document Store
You know, it wouldn't be that hard for HN to read the target article and do a quick Checksum on the Body text. Sure would save a lot of dupes.

EDIT: For some reason I can't reply to your comment, Jacques. But hey! It's easy to say, how hard can it be to code? :)
Sadly, like the iPhone application, this doesn't work for magazines purchased through the Kindle store. Not sure why they're restricting the non-device applications to books only.
This is one of the most egotistical and self centered writings I have (partially) read in a long time.

I quit reading when he started using himself "as an example". Talking about himself seemed to be the point of this post.
Automation frees people from doing something productive, not from working. If we (as a society) leave them alone, they'll just clutter around their formally useful job, and become banking middle manager or something similar, which moves a lot of paperwork around, but produce little actual value.

This is similar to what we experienced in Europe with nobles: the end of feodal times made noblemen mostly useless as warriors or local mobsters; since they had nothing useful to do with their free time, they became passionate with court intrigues, ballroom dancing, fancy wigs, duels, and other improductive occupations.

However, it's been fixed: after centuries of wasted potential, capitalism created a draft toward productive activities, and the dominant classes worked at organizing the workforce, eventually leading to the industrial revolution.

We have (again, as a society) to find a way to make today's socially useful activities attractive: most people will concede that an eldery care person is way more useful than many middle managers; yet the latters get more money and social recognition. I suspect that such issues aren't fixed spontaneously by the so-called "invisible hand of market".
I'll pretend you're asking in earnest: Depending on the need, you have a bevy of parser-generators to choose from. My favorite is SableCC.

Or, if you want something lightweight where you effectively have a DSL without creating an actual language, look towards static imports + fluent interfaces + builder pattern:

http://blog.centuryminds.com/2007/10/java-static-imports-flu...
I've never seen a public end of life policy. I know that some companies that use a startup's technology often include a clause that if they go out of business the customer company will be able to buy the technology at a reasonable price.

Do you know of any examples of such a policy?
A friend of mine has a podcast about travel hacking the frequent flyer system over at upgrd.com. It's got a lot of great stuff. I just got my first upgrade to first class for free this past week flying back home from MN to CA.
If you're interested in traveling a lot, and getting the most out of it, it's worth a listen.
Announcing O'Reilly Answers
I'm going to make that a special issue of sorts, I really think that would go a long way towards dealing with plenty of the problems that I see in cloud services and third party hosted solutions.

This really needs attention.
How I Started TDD
Congrats, so you figured out the difference between an intro/extrovert. Do you think an extrovert engineer at google would somehow produce software that less monopolistic than an introvert's software?

I don't think introverts have a less diverse skill set than extroverts either. It's harder for extroverts to perceive an introvert's skill set so it's highly likely that you're probably just unaware. I'd say the majority of business leaders are actually introverts.
There are three ideas in this paper that may be news to you:

* in MySQL, you can "SELECT 0x414243" and get "ABC"

* you can append "INTO DUMPFILE foo" to a query and MySQL will write the results to the filesystem.

* MySQL won't let you tack an injected statement to the end of another query, but SQL UNION clauses will allow you to add arbitrary SELECTs to a victim query.

Combine these ideas and you can turn SQL injection on some (rare) server configurations into code execution.
Google’s Holiday Gift: Free Wi-Fi at Airports
1. if you think you code is good, you wont strive to improve if it defaults as crap and has to prove itself that its good, then you should end up with better code

2. I think your putting a different emphashis on "care"

3. same as 1.

4. no, your higherup only cares about the final product, thats very different from caring about the code, if a bunch of hacks gets the job done quicker than the elegantly carved solution, they dont care (unless your hacks part of the core and delay the next part)
The author argues that failed software projects are nonetheless beneficial:

Their development employs many bureaucrats, consultants and contractors and their expenditure supports an even larger number of people throughout society.

... by the same argument I should stroll around the city and burn some cars, thereby offering employment to many firefighters, car producers, actuaries and all their suppliers.

The point about ever-expanding bureaucracies is well noted however. Perhaps it is our duty to design really bad programming languages and methodologies, to sell them to government organisations and similar bureaucracies in order to drive their likelihood of success even lower. Reminds me of the true purpose of Ada ... http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-0...
Yeah, but it makes people feel better :)
I feel like this needs a followup article on The Onion. "Google Engineer Baffled That She's Not Returning His Calls; 'I just commented that her breasts were of optimal volume relative to the dress she wore to dinner that night! What does she mean, calling me a pig?!'"
I'll admit that some of it is clever, but I still don't find it that funny.

And I may be way off base here, but I think many people don't like this twitter account simply because of its popularity. They can't like what 'everyone' else likes.
Keyword colon flamebait question: a reliable tool for getting links?
Awesome. Now let's work towards the day when this is not an exclusive choice.
Expect Google Caffeine index update after the holidays
If I'm following the author, increased efficiency (successful software projects) leads to increased time on the hands of bureaucrats. Increased time leads to increased meaningless tasks. So, the author's solution is not to find something meaningful for people to do with the time, or to simply give people more time off work (because according to the 2 references he cites, that would be impossible), but to celebrate the destruction of efficiency (failed software projects).

There are many things wrong with the way our society rewards work/ constructs bureaucracies. I think, however, that it wouldn't be too hard to come up with some practical solutions rather than encourage subconscious intentional failure.
No, the point is to make the Kindle hardware a good-enough substitute for a book that they can use it as a loss leader to grow their digital book business.

Or, the iPhone/PC/etc versions of the Kindle reader make every Kindle sold even better, giving you more reason to buy a Kindle and Kindle books. I.e. even if your kindle breaks you can still read the books you bought.
Yes. Much better, thanks.
They may get frozen accounts, but the ad publishers don't froze them just like that (everyone could paralyze ad publishing on sites they don't like) so if they see that "click" was made with "I'm a bot that click things" user agent they will detect "invalid" click, not sneaky fraud attempts :) (although someone may also use PyQt4 webkit apps as a fraud apps, but it's not the point of this code tutorials). It may be used in "bad" or "good" ways.
There was an article posted about people being willing to scroll for content. It showed several prominent sites and demonstrated that successful sites like Amazon were willing to make people scroll for content.

But if you look at them carefully, while Amazon is willing to make people scroll for content they don't make you scroll for the picture or the purchase button. Given how much A/B testing they do, I would assume that they have real data for those choices. So while you can put a lot below the fold, there does seem to be value in having certain things above the fold.
That's right. People asked about this in the comments on the post. His answers are here:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404#comment-242133

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404#comment-242156

Bottom line: libgif and libpng.
blister@gmail.com
Strange, that's not what I heard:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128183930.ht...
http://seekingalpha.com/article/31884-can-royal-dutch-shell-...
That's kind of how I see it. I can sympathize with that, though. It's frustrating to see lots of people like something you can't stand. I have the same reaction to Jason Mraz, American Beauty, and Firefly.
It looks like it's not based on the actual stackoverflow code.

http://builtwith.com/?http://answers.oreilly.com/

Says, PHP / Rails. Where as Stackoverflow is ASP.MVC.
Wow, what a massively convenient conclusion. Food activist hobbyhorse #1 can be solved by food activist hobbyhorse #2. There is enough wishful thinking here to power 1000 Twitter IPOs.
PyQt4 is a GUI framework that has full browser engine - WebKit. Sellenium tests run in the browser - so you would have to make such tests that dump DOM tree (parsed HTML source) from the browser and not the standard non-parsed page source.
Hmmm. I can send zip files through GMail.

However, I can't receive zip files through my work email which is a policy decision made by our network admins. (You can rename it .zipX or something like that and it will go through. They have been burnt by users clicking on any random attachment and getting Trojans and viruses.)

I don't seem to be able to send an exe through GMail though.
There are a lot more than "30 or so" pieces of goodness. Applications (directly user-invoked executables) aren't the only vectors for malware and viruses. A quick scan of my Windows 7 installation - just the Windows directory - turns up about 17600 EXEs, DLLs and SYS files, which isn't an exhaustive list of potential module types. Any of those are subject to change on a monthly basis as updates get installed.

And this doesn't even start counting applications, and their update and patch mechanisms.
You can send zips, you just can't send exes or zips including exes.
Hopefully in that time, some kind of data inter-change standard will appear, making this point moot.

Imagine import/export compatibility between all popular issue tracking apps. Given that most follow the ticket paradigm (as they share design pedigree) this would not be unthinkable from a technical viewpoint. However, it may be an uphill battle from an economical/political viewpoint : companies may not find this openness to their benefit.
The only way to solve the problem is to figure out a good way to allow humans to be healty while they eat crap.
Everything ESR has written about hacker culture boils down to "hey, people like me are really awesome!" and often not much to how things really are...
Eh, easy_install has been a sort of sticking point with me for a while. One of those things that makes me shake my fist at the sky and leaves me a bit baffled that I seem to be the only one pulling his hair out.

So far as I can tell there is no way for easy_install to do anything but install packages. I see an "upgrade" command but it seems to only work if I specify the package name, and I don't see any way to list what version of what is installed. I also don't see any way to remove packages.

In short, this means easy_install turns my system into a mystery grab bag of packages that I can't remove without fishing around in site-packages.

Unless of course I'm missing something, but if I'm missing something it certainly isn't obvious.
That's a very strong Libertarian case.
Government spending must be cut very significantly.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster file earnings, positive about merger
Probably very few - it appears to be more about another dead SaaS company and the question of - what happens to the IP/data?
Does twitter kill the blogging star ?
Indeed! I am very excited about this. I've been trying to figure out how to parse rendered JavaScript for so long. Currently installing pyqt on my workstation ;)
Barbara Liskov describes how she helped lay the foundation for today’s languages
I'm all in favor of simplicity, but there isn't much that seems simple about this proposal.
I think this is clearly a response to StackOverflow. If I can get a lot of high quality content on the sorts of things O'Reilly publishes books about in a free online place (StackOverflow) why would I waste money on purchasing their books?

Notice that they will be 'rewarding' contributions with points redeemable for books. This site exists because O'Reilly is afraid StackOverflow will result in a loss of sales of their books and they have no original idea on how to combat the problem.
The health problem with food that travels a long way is the processing that is done to it, not the traveling it did. I predict that a large move towards more regional distribution of food will also result in more regional processing, and the processing will create unhealthy food.

Why does processing produce unhealthy food? The reason is that the food industry has discovered that the right balance of sugar, fat and salt triggers emotional reactions that cause people to crave and consume. If you're a food manufacturer who wants to increase sales, this is a good thing. For more on this read The End of Overeating.
Only if you're aware that the virus is running, and it doesn't do something disastrous in the meantime (eg, sniff your keystrokes while you enter a bank account number or log into the hospital records system).
How To Write And Design A Successful Advertisement
It seems MongoDB and CouchDB have better documentation.

This article talks about configuring things like the gossip protocol. Does anyone know of a good article on Riak that shows how to store and retrieve data for something like a blog?
Er if you wanted votes on so many aspects you might as well have just asked for people's opinions.

From what I have read, this seems to be actually getting made into law. This is a pretty boneheaded move and is going to produce something akin to the Win Vista UAC.
CupCake CNC build part 1: Introduction & background
This is a great post. The author explains his methodology for testing this behavior (including a wrong turn at the beginning, which was instructive); does thorough research; demonstrates striking performance graphs; and provides a simple and effective solution to the problem.
I see what you mean, and I haven't been able to find a full text of what was said about each topic. Out of context, I saw each point as an unsubstantiated claim that was part of a single, larger point. There wasn't an indication that each of those had a complete discussion following.

If those were points gleaned from a larger discussion of "things to bet on", then I stand by my original statement. However, I'd look forward to seeing what was said in particular if each of those was a specific topic of discussion.
Make your Own Cereal with MojaMix
Does the term Government encompass the U.S. "Defense" industry? How about "Health Care"? Ignore the current health care bill(s) debate -- there's plenty of opportunity just getting medical records online securely.

Whether there are startup opportunities therein is another question.

Not being there, I couldn't tell if pg was addressing startup opportunities, or general business opportunities. Or if there's any difference between the two.
It's a story like this that illustrates the power of a good idea, the ability to get stuff done, and some software.

$750,000,000 is a lot of value to create in 3 years.

And full marks to Google, who may have over-paid, but they've done so successfully before. Their portfolio has now become even more compelling. They remain unparalleled at identifying what move to make before everyone else.

I wonder how the executive meetings at Microsoft and Yahoo went the next morning. Disbelief? Dazed? Anger? A sinking feeling?
Java supports type erasure, which it idiosyncratically calls "generics", even though it does not allow generic programming. A generic function in a language with actual generics can work generically, on more than one type. A "generic" function in Java can work on exactly one type, namely the type which the "generic" type becomes after type erasure.

You can use "? extends SomeInterface" only if you write SomeInterface wrappers for every type which you want to use "generically." This is boilerplate relative to most other languages.
I've written at least 3 versions of this algorithm in various flavors of RPG for the iSeries (AS/400).

The most complete one weighs in at 251 lines (175 w/o comments) but it also does a lot of checking to make sure that the CC number matches the CC type.

I'm much happier using Python these days. ;-)
"Why Python is dead" was posted yesterday. ("No changes for three years.")
Distributed and concurrent programming with RabbitMQ and EventMachine
Americans will really do anything to lose weight, except nutrition and exercise.
I like his tribute to Apple - its very true that Apple has completely changed the mobile space for the better.
Although I've never met Mr. Raymond, since his own measures (self-display, insecurity, constant approval-seeking, overinflating one’s accomplishments, etc) would lead most to the obvious conclusion that the he is either a small person or a hypocrite, I think he may actually be attempting some kind of transcendent Andy Kaufman performance humor - the real joke being the predictability of everyone's reactions.
Don't see an actual problem, my cookies are set to autodelete anyway.

It sends the right message actually, try making your site work without cookies.
Jobs has never understood the value of the gaming market w/r to building a computing platform. Something that pretty much everybody does one a computing platform as soon as they have a spot of free time. Hell, people were figuring out gaming on cathode ray tubes in the late 40's.

To be fair, I think he's desperately trying to not turn Apple into Commodore.
Step by step process of Making money through your blog
It is almost impossible to earn money through your blog in starting phase but when you start earning it will be easier to you to gain income and subscriber. Never felt down with your early performance. Do hard work, try to increase blog visitors by commenting on others blog and guest posting. These are the best strategy to gain subscribers.
This looks like Vista UAC meeting the interwebs. Annoying as hell and probably extremely damaging to datacenter operations in the EU.