skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux distros without too much trouble: static linking.

That's not simple at all. If I want to integrate properly with your desktop, do I write my code against gnome or KDE?

If I statically link against an older (or newer) version of gnome or KDE, will it even interoperate correctly with whatever the user has running on their desktop?

If there's a security vulnerability in what should be a base system library, does every single vendor have to track those issues and release updates to their applications?

No. 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.
Apple battles 'jailbreakers' over iPhone control
From the article: "That fast decisive action was refreshing, and such a contrast to the slow, secretive, bureaucracy at Microsoft. That speed and decisiveness also reflects different approaches to hiring great people, building great products and serving customers well."

I am really not trying to be disparaging to Google, but is this really true in Google's hiring practices in general? I know they can snap up big names in a hurry, which Microsoft has also done in the past, but from the outside looking in, it seems like their hiring process is slow and consensus based, and from what I hear, you don't even know what group you'll be working in until late in the process. For some people, that can look "slow, secretive, and bureaucratic". I'm not saying it's the wrong approach for Google, but it is what it is.
Microsoft could have quite legitimately just yanked the app until they could rewrite it without the GPL code. The contractor would be toast (probably had an indemnification clause), MS wouldn't have been on the hook for that much even if the copyright holders of the GPL code sued for infringement, as it wasn't willful.

The GPL absolutely does not force them to do so. It cannot, as it is simply a copyright license. The GPL actually terminated as soon as MS distributed the code, since they weren't following it's rules.

I don't know if they have a formal agreement with the copyright owner, or if they're just following what is an accepted practice in opening the source, but technically GPL v2 cannot be "reactivated" on its own.
I agree with you, but I may not have made my point clearly enough: It's not about "should he use regexes?" it's the other classic mistake of not clarifying the problem domain first.

Everybody is assuming he wants to parse this document, which isn't proven and is mostly unfounded. What if it's the text of a book, including all sorts of mentalism that will blow up any parser? Nowhere does it say that he's got valid (or invalid) HTML/XML here.

It's actually as if he said "hey, can I borrow a screwdriver?" and everyone went "He wants a screwdriver? He must be building a box, and that means nails! Give him a hammer! A hammer! You can't put in nails with a screwdriver, Zalgo wouldn't do that!"

So now he's off trying to put his screws in with a hammer, because in the race for points people wouldn't first ask him to clarify the problem domain and work out what he's actually trying to achieve.
For this vision to become reality, the process would need to get much, much easier.

I think that's the whole point.

The services provided by Flickr and Facebook used to be quite a bit more difficult to achieve, too.
Snow Leopard: Software Update windows display security certificates
[Podcast] Morality & eating animals: strong data showed by Jonathan Safran Foer
Well thank goodness someone agrees with me. I just hope the Googlers reading this get the idea. And as someone said, a mousewheel is the solution - hopefully temporarily.
Ask HN: Is security by obfuscation sufficient?
I am currently working on a web application that allows users to upload files. There is much more to it than this of course, but I am asking the following question solely in relation to the storage of files.

I am planning on using a CDN (such as Amazon's S3) and my question is simple: How effective is obfuscating the names of publicly available files using a UUID for security purposes? For example, naming a file something like this 4b013ca21ba608373efb4717.jpg.

I would be fascinated to hear any thoughts from the HN users. Certain questions spring to mind, like:

- How easy would these be to guess? Can there be any guarantees of uniqueness?

- What is the best algorithm to create them?

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

I understand that this is an application specific question, that depends on what level of security I require, among other factors. But, for purposes of this discussion, lets just say that it needs to be high, but no Fort Knox: if a file was comprised it would not be critical.

Thank you in advance for any help. :)
I haven't spent enough time with K to get to that point of naturalness. I do think a k like language that used slightly more natural nemonics could have much broader appeal with minimal impact on code length. IMHO what makes k (and j for that matter) concise is the primitives, how they combine naturally, and how iteration is subsumed to avoid any form "item at a time" code. That last bit is what separates it from the common map/fold idioms in other languages.

Example: http://www.nsl.com/papers/kisntlisp.htm
http://autonomo.us/ has a lot of discussions of this topic.
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> Except that a machine language program would be thousands if not millions of times as long.

Oi, I seriously doubt that. Seriously, millions? It's all math. Take a couple of assembler instructions per operation. I bet there's 256 byte assembler demo's out there...
The source to Mr Whitney's prior language, A+, is available.
Thanks for the responses, everyone. Almost completely by chance I came across a utility today that meets my criteria. This modified version of CleanArchiver can encrypt files, works in Snow Leopard and is free:

http://trip2me.tistory.com/56

The article is in Korean and took a while for me to translate but the utility works.
Unlikely. Google doesn't appear to operate that way, they are very careful with their hiring. And outside of hacker news and other tiny techie/startup circles this hiring (and the firing) isn't on the radar, I don't think it affects Microsoft's appearance outside of the startup community one bit.

Also, according to Don's blog the first offer from Google came 90 minutes after the news of his firing was out. Which seems more an indication that google really wants him, and less an indication of cold strategic PR calculation. Nearly everyone who's been following Don Dodge's work was surprised by MS's move and considered it a mistake, so google's move is not surprising in the least.
Tell YC: New York Entrepreneur Work streaming live 11/16 - 11/20
NVIDIA Targeting Real-Time Cloud Rendering
> Nothing about the GPL "forces" the infringer to divulge their code -- that's simply one available option.

Wrong, 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.
As far as technical details in fiction are concerned, I think they can enhance a story when they are described in a way that lets non-technical users image a system that at least has roughly the right inputs and outputs. I find that Charles Stross does this very well, particularly in Accelerando, Atrocity Archives, and Jennifer Morgue.

From Atrocity Archives: "he'll have to enlist GCHQ and a scanning tunneling microscope to find it under all the 0xDEADBEEF spammed across the hard disk platters."

Even without fully knowing about these concepts, you still get a rich picture of of a hard-drive wipe (hopefully the reader is savvy enough not to imagine anything too bovine).

What this pretty much boils down to is the popular fiction writing mantra "show, don't tell".
Why does it have to be some specialized high volume custom phone system? I don't think my local government did any such thing.

So people can't get through instantly and some probably can't ever get in until demand lessens and inventories increase. How, statistically, does that differ from putting a deli-style number dispenser on a corner and saying "go for it!" to a city full of people?
Yes "Lost", a little "The Wire", yes "The Sopranos".

If the info is essential to "keep up" -- that is, it wasn't completely predicted by the earlier trajectory of the show, and it's not easily ignorable as subsidiary to the main plot -- then it is a "twist", in my meaning.

The shows you mention use multiple overlapping story arcs -- some for just the current show, some for several episodes, some for the season, some for the entire run -- in order to fight short attention spans. There's something for everyone, including lots of short cuts between simultaneous (or flashback) story lines, to keep the pace of "reveals" sufficient for even fidgety, clicker-happy viewers.
There's nothing about the GPL that says you can't sell your product.

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.

That -- without any shadow of a doubt -- hurts sales (even if you "highly doubt it").

RedHat sells services, not software. That's why they can afford for CentOS to keep doing what they do.
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.
Apple Changes App Store Links to be SEO Friendly
That's golfing though. Most real code gets a bit more wordy.

I could, for instance, cut about 80% of my line count in the two Q projects I've open sourced if I used naming and spacing conventions as shown.

http://github.com/DannoHung/qutil
http://github.com/DannoHung/qspec

[/Tooting Own Horn]
Whatever happened to Hearts? During the dot-com boom, developers would gather and play Hearts at lunch. When I was interviewing back then, over and over again I'd get asked, "oh, and do you play hearts?" Ended up working for a company where we played everyday.
I wrote a rather basic J-ish interpreter, but it was understand the mindset of the language, rather than to have a practical implementation. (I don't think I have it anymore, but it was only about two pages of Lua.) To do it well, real experience with J/K/APL would probably be necessary. It wouldn't need to be absolutely compatible with K, just a similar language.

FWIW, there's A+ (http://www.aplusdev.org/), but I would far rather stick to the ASCII character set.

* http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum
I like Google Docs, but wait til Dodge wants to track changes in a shared word processing document. Fine-toothed footer/header tweaks are also far better in Word.
There are some things you just can't do at the model level, for example if the email contains a URL dependent on internationalization (ie myapp.com/login or myapp.co.uk/login) the logic is in the controller (you could store the preferred local but this is just an example).

Who does the actual sending via model callbacks/controller actions anymore anyway? It's prime background task material and you should just be shoving it onto a queue.
I know a guy who wrote an open mostly Q interpreter. KX Systems did not appreciate it very much.
I think you forgot one of the most important aspects: personal media hosting, being able to watch your movies or listen to your music from anywhere in the world.
If everything seems under control then you aren't going fast enough - Mario Andretti

{
If you’ve never hit the ground while skydiving, you’re opening your parachute too early.

If you’ve never gotten food poisoning, you haven’t been eating interesting enough food.

If you’ve never gotten a speeding ticket, you’re driving too slow.
} - Ari

To wit: Maximize your expected return.
> I am sure Cuil would disagree with this

That assumes that a later release of Cuil would have done any better. My assumption is that an even buggier release much earlier would have indicated that there was no market for what they were offering, and saved their investors $x million dollars.

Certainly whatever improvements they've done haven't moved the needle on their visitors:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cuil.com/

If it was a case that the bugginess of the alpha put people off, you'd expect an initial spike, then a slump, then a rising slope as new visitors stuck with the improved post-alpha product. Instead it's just been a downward slope.
What? Only survey results, nothing on what the answers probably are?

Seems this is just advertisement
Why are most researchers not a fan of standards on "responsible disclosure"
I hadn't heard about rolling out extensions yet. Do explain.
The point should be that every platform company needs great developer evangelism, and a great developer evangelist should certainly be serving the developer community as much as they serve the company that writes their check. This is why the current situation is ultimately a win for Google and a loss for Microsoft.

Fake Steve misses the point on this one, which is a surprise considering how amazingly great Apple is doing with developer evangelism on the iPhone. No wonder he wouldn't want Don Dodge. What would he do with someone like that?
I think he probably did but didn't want to talk about it.
Random file name: You can create an md5 hash of the original file name and use that for the public file name. From what I understand it's extremely unlikely to have two strings hash into the same value. It's also long and nearly impossible to guess.

Security: I had a similar need for my website and figured that if I'm the only one that knows about the URL then it's secure. I was dead wrong. Some browser plug-ins look at each url you enter and spider them. I know this is true because I started to see Alexa hit unpublished admin URLs on my website.

Unpublished URLs != Security.
Sure: wm iconphoto

http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TkCmd/wm.htm#M36
Judging from the descriptions of the unknowns on the list, and his own title tag 'Make Money Online,' I think this list is really geared to a, well, 'you can make money online doing nothing' crowd. This is the author's bio blurb: I am 20 years old and am living the Internet Lifestyle which means I make money while I sleep and get to do what I want, when I want!

Half the entries are there because they did things like 'monetized his Problogger website in two new ways this year, by adding a paid forum and an eBook which has influenced a lot of other bloggers to follow suit.'

'Timothy is doing things the way they should be, you don’t have to just monetize your website with banner adverts, and you want to diversify your income so it comes in multiple streams. Timothy has earned over $150,000 in one month from his blog and makes it look so easy, check out one of his monthly blogging reports to see how he does it!'

'Another person I met at the Underground in 2009, James has really set a new standard for affiliate blogging. If you took James’s site and put it along side some of the top blogs in our list and looked at the traffic, James would only have a small fraction of their traffic but would most likely be earning more! Check out James’s website and learn how to create a affiliate funnel to bring in a lot more money from your blog!'
So, What Do You Use To Twitter?
Expressing the percentages this way is misleading, because it leads people to believe that they should allocate their time proportionately to the different factors that lead to success. This is pretty ridiculous on it's face, but I'd say >90% of athletes and coaches believe it, even on the professional level.

While strictly speaking we could probably do more to educate people about this fallacy, it would probably just be easier to express the same idea with respect to time. That is, figure out how you should be spending each day to maximize success, and then go from there.

Let's say you train 3 hours a day. Of that, maybe 90 minutes should be cardio, 60 minutes should be strength, and 30 minutes should be devoted to pushing oneself. And while these high intensity pieces are mostly designed to make one mentally tougher, they also make one physically stronger as well. So therefore, we get that ~10% of success is mental.

The good thing about expressing the problem this way is that it leads people to measure what they do and optimize their training according to what's empirically happening to their bodies and performance, rather than arbitrarily choosing some system and ignoring all feedback.
I'm not talking about parsing HTML. I'm talking about getting data out of HTML which is completely different.

One doesn't need to guess at all possible combinations of badness using a regex, you just need to find the data you need and adjust the regex to the badness of that particular page.

Do you know anyone that mines for data out of HTML "in the wild"? I didn't think so.
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.

My entire point is that this isn't true. The aforementioned game released its source code--and nobody cared.

The GPL applies to code only--nothing else. If a game's source code is GPL, that doesn't give anyone permission to legally distribute the game--all the art and assets are still not GPL'd, only the binaries are. I don't see how one could possibly sanely think that I would find a copy of, say, Civilization 4 without models, textures, and sound to be useful.

And companies vastly overvalue their source code. They assume that since they spent $1m developing something that the source is worth $1m, when in reality there's probably nobody in the world who would pay a cent for their crappy code.
There are also exceptions for active military personnel (any age) and off-duty military personnel (21 years at most rental places.) Further, most of the time you can rent the car, but just pay more.

I think the big issue is that the vehicle owner is not liable for damages caused by a tank ;)
your link doesn't work. Try this one instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself
I was not aware there was a term for this. Also called DIE (Duplication is Evil).
Don't HTML parsers use regexes for their lexical scan phase?
> Old code that passes the string to a strcat() will fail in mysterious ways. And your old libraries probably expect 1-byte characters anyway, which means you're going to be constantly converting

But they will have that same problem with UTF-8, right? Just as soon as you start using non-Latin characters? And if you aren't, there's no point in going beyond ASCII.
Yet another reason to run your own company.
also, when you start going bald/gray
It's not clear what you're trying to secure against. Are you worried about securing a particular image so that only certain designated users can see it? Are you worried about the original name "leaking"? Are you worried about someone iterating through all of your images?

In general, relying on a "secret" URL is not a good way to keep things secret. Google has a nasty habit of finding URLs you thought had no links. Definitely tune your robots.txt to keep the images off legit search engines.
I think this deserved pointing out. I'm not sure where this Don Dodge is great stuff comes from or what it's based on but these few posts about him do make him seem coin-operated. The best developer evangelists are able to be sincere, thoughtful and helpful. Without those qualities it's a job that tends to make you into a shill.
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FSJ has a point here. The blind endorsment of Google technology within a week of switching jobs is fishy. Plain and simple.
Ask HN: Advice regarding past due accounts and getting paid?
My company does hosted load testing on a consulting basis. Most of my competitors don't demand upfront payment, so we haven't either. My last two clients are proving difficult to collect payment from. This is a huge let-down to me.

I'm wondering if anyone has advice on collecting past due accounts (or preventing them)? I'd like to hear how you approach collection in scenarios like this? Steps? Timeframes? Lawyers? Rules of thumb? Etc. Thanks!
Another fantastic social/trading game is the card game Bohnanza. I prefer it to Catan because Catan feels too chance-driven:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohnanza

The briefest explanation is you have a randomly drawn hand that you can see but not rearrange, so you try to enact trades/changes that support your future cards.
I know I'm a bit late in replying, I'm guessing this won't be read - but oh well!

Typically, it is assumed that a typing represents the whole of the Self; I tend to use it only as a generalization of the Self.

Coming from a Jungian background, the psyche is composed of multiple (if not many) complexes. Each complex being an autonomous psychic entity but a component of the psychic Self.

Each complex can have its own typing. The Anima (feminine complex) could very well be an ESTJ and the Animus (masculine complex) could be a INSJ. The compound result of all the complexes results in the dynamic and volatile nature of the psyche.

This multi-faceted nature of the psyche produces a (to me) accurate view of the psychic Self; a person can too have a type that generally dominates the whole of the their psychic Self as well (ie: I'm an INTJ, my Animus is more of an ISTP and my Anima is an ENFJ - don't forget there are other complexes).

Also, MB typing is not value free. If something were value free it would not be of value ;) The difference between "introverted" and "boring" isn't in the value of each term, it is in the interpretation of the value of each term.

One could consider boring and introversion to both be an inward psychic motion. Boring - to bore - going within; is uncomfortable for many people because within their psyche they must experience their complexes as opposed to projecting their complexes and experiencing them outside of the psyche (with other people, things, etc...). Hence why "boring" is imbued with bad or un-associative thought.

Introverts tend to be internally focused and rarely engage in the projection atmosphere commonly seen with large groups of familiars or extroverted (to different degrees) people. When a person is not engaging in a projection that another wishes to engage in, the person not engaging is typically considered "boring" or "serious" or "anti-social".

Please note, neither extroversion nor introversion is better or worse than the other. Claiming and accepting the complexes of the psyche within leads to both a happier introvert (that is more extroverted) and a happier extrovert (that is more introverted). Just like claiming and accepting the feminine or masculine self leads to a more balanced individual; it just happens that one is already dominated by the other and finds it to be a natural setting. The above paragraph was using familiar language to convey a point, but was limiting in its scope.

All things have value, even if that value is unit value (or 1). Value is provided by the human mind and subject to valuing meme levels (context dependent).

The majority of Hacker News readers are in a mix of systemic (computers, systems) and entrepreneurial (startups, ambition) valuing memes. The Hacker News reader typically values the experiences they have within their life at this stage based on those memes.
I want things to look nice because it makes me feel good. That's different from wanting to make a fashion statement.