skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've used a couple of these (http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-XE102-Wall-Plugged-Ethernet-Br...) in the past to get information out of a secure area (during a pen test).

We got the idea from the same hack you mention; though as with yourself my boss cant recall any other details apart from remembering it sounded really cool at the time :D
SIGH Some people are such fashion idiots. We get it. You think Java is like wearing flares. It's unfashionable to you hip idiots.

You're having a blast hacking together your dynamic stuff without a care in the world. You love how you can type 3 less characters and get the same work done! Woo! High five! You have your repl setup so you can edit (and break) your website on the fly. Static typing? who needs it. Lets write our own type checking all over the code.

Meanwhile, people who don't care what is fashionable, are making awesome stuff in whatever language they assess does the job best.

For anyone who hates Java, I'd recommend:

* Ignore everyone who writes Java commercially.
*especially* corporates doing their massive TomCat
beans getter/setter XML over engineered crap.
* Do NOT use an IDE. You don't need to. It makes you
output more code, and worse code.
* Figure out your own concise style, and figure out
the absolute strengths of Java (There's many).

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.

Talking of languages "Dying" is also quite ridiculous. Languages are 'alive' as long as people use them. Guess what? If a new JVM is never released, it still solves a massive class of problems.

A good programmer beats a good <language> programmer IMHO.

</rant>
The law is active since July 2003. There were a lot of buzz among e-commerce companies and shareware developers about it.

The changes eliminate an existing competitive distortion by obliging non-EU suppliers to charge VAT as EU suppliers when they are providing electronic services to EU non taxable persons, something which EU businesses had been actively seeking for some time.

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/traders/e-... (official website)

Article:

http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/2194111

Also:

http://www.avangate.com/articles/software-vat-123.htm

Private customers (consumers) in EU countries must be charged VAT for electronically supplied services and products, both by EU and non-EU providers.

...

Non-EU companies that trade with European consumers (private customers) need to register and account for VAT.
Does high TBPR naturally means high ranking
Are you one among those who really think that high TBPR has much to do with high ranking? If yes, giving a glance on this post might help you a lot to realize the fact.
Normally, I wouldn't post things from ESR's blog and that's because I don't read it. I don't read it because it's mostly non-technical (he usually covers political or philosophical topics that don't interest me).

Because the ForgePlucker got posted to HN I learned of it and hence the last couple of days interactions. The resulted in me reading his blog a bit and hence this posting.

I've looked at a whole bunch of code you wrote and without exception it is exemplary, that's the way to do it, lead by example, not by going after an individual, no matter how silly they are.

You haven't looked hard enough :-) I'm sure there's quite a bit of stuff I'd be ashamed of today.
Yes, cabal is the thing to steal. Improving distutils is worthwhile, but a temporary stop gap, most fundamental issues cannot be solved from improving distutils. Distutils itself is only 10 000 LOC of bad code, without good API, and you can reuse most setup.py from a conversion step.

I have started playing with a cabal-like project.

http://github.com/cournape/toydist

It does not do much ATM, except for the conversion step: it can generates a static description of the package from existing setup.py. It reuses distutils to build package, but it does so from the declarative file, meaning that the whole thing is not tied to distutils anymore: distutils becomes an implementation detail.
Funny that this article praises C#'s generics over Java's type erasures, when Rich Hickey specifically cited the latter, and the convenience it creates for dynamic languages, as a reason for choosing the JVM over the CLR for his implementation of Clojure.
"you won't notice any performance degradation at all"

O RLY??

I beg to differ. I've seen the PCs of friends and relations reduced to a pitiful level of performance by well known so-called "security" software.
again, please don't upvote question headlines. cowardly journalism, easily abused, insubstantial stories. just don't do it.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this to become as serious a thread as it was. I meant my response lightheartedly, as in: "Hey, you could look at it like that and you'll find it." It's got a very 1950s mindset, and I was saying that if you get hooked that's what I realized that made me stop reading it.

Libel? It's an Internet comment, and it's not one taking itself that seriously. It's not like I'm launching a massive anti-Rules campaign. It's my opinion, and I was trying not to be a douche about it. Sorry if I came across as douchey.

But, seriously, "I'll go Communications major on your ass" is a threat? I was implying that if he wanted to be an asshole, I'd devote some major time to explaining what makes Shitmydadsays such a compelling read for me, from the perspective of somebody who's career is going to be focused on the written word.
It is very difficult to make 700,000 people laugh with a text message. You have to aim for the common denominator; "cerebral jokes" won't cut it. I'm not saying he's a comic genius, but I am saying that you could not regularly make 30 strangers laugh with a one-liner.
I spent 2 years working tech support for a large cable ISP. We offered a free antivirus/firewall package. In my experience, the AV software was more likely to break your PC than an actual virus, and we'd often get calls where people were infested with malware the AV package didn't stop.

AV software gives you a false sense of security, imo.
Venture Capital funding announcements for the Boston area
Did you really take the post that personally?
I think you've left out a more important point. The results are generated by unique user input interacting with the algorithms. Claiming copyright over the result is a kin to Adobe claiming copyright over your work product because you used Photoshop to create it. Granted the amount contributed by the software vs. the person is different but where do you draw the line.
Upvoted for "The Machine Stops". What vision from 1908! I notice that it's copyright EMF 1947. Any idea what that means? There's something about 'dying in France' that made me think of the Great War.
C# and Java may look similar, but they have drastically different ecosystems. C# can evolve much faster because Microsoft can drop their support of older versions and make them practically inviable. MS customers are used to the cycle and have learned to expect it. The large corporations that adopt Java, on the other hand, don't expect and don't want the language to change. They have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in code, and they won't let any vendor tell them it's obsolete.
Source: Jajah In Middle Of Bidding War That Could Drive Price Up To $400 Million
Game developer Electronic Arts announces 1500 job cuts
I think you do need to explain this to the developer. I doubt you'll find some magic solution here, and talking to the developers is basically what being PM is all about. Communicating with people is as central to a PM as code is to a developer.

If after explaining he keeps repeating the same mistake, perhaps the problem's with him. If you find this happens with more than one developer, perhaps the problem is with you. You might decide to change the process - pass the mockup to a designer first, and then the designer's output to the developer.
Google Caffeine Sandbox Complete, New Google Index Coming
The strange thing is that even though Java is very much backwards compatible, big vendors behave as if every new version would break everything.

I've had to move heaven and earth for an upgrade from 1.4.1 to 1.4.2 when Java 6 was just around the corner, and I hear that there are still many teams using Java 1.4.
Developing an IT scorecard
Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert
There is no such thing as an A-list. If you think that you are in the A-list because you are a worldwide renown developer, you can always be better, and be one of the best developers of all times. Or one of the biggest people of all time. You can always be better.

So you think you are the best mathematician all around? You can still compete with Gauss.
Is Flash frowned upon for building web apps?
Just wondering since I'm mainly a Flash guy, but I get the impression that flash built web apps are kind of a no-no even with back button support and such. Any thoughts?
If you're going to implicitly say that Java code is more "manageable" than alternatives, then you're going to have to provide citations, or at least meaningful stories of your experience.

The most important purpose of higher-level programming languages is to remove accidental complexities.

I can give you dozens of examples where Java fails to do that ... as opposed to other languages, some of them mainstream. Some examples ... nullable references, checked exceptions (which are a class of their own), no compile-time code contracts (the type-system is way too weak), concurrency based on shared state and mutexes, public/protected instance variables (with a god-awful getters/setters convention), no real closures (an anonymous class instantiation only captures final locals), no multi-dispatching (this could take care of half of all possible Java-related gotchas, at least), no pattern-matching operator (switch doesn't count). And the list can go on and on.

I've also worked on "big" code-bases written in Java. Some Java open-source libraries are truly beautiful, but these particular projects were not. On one of them it took one whole month to fix a bug that escaped us because of all the layers and all the boilerplate that was executing. This particular bug only happened like once a month, and debugging multi-threading Java code is a nightmare (I guess it could be worse).

Sorry, but this argument doesn't fly. I work in a Perl shop and not all programmers here are in "the top 10%" (I don't think either of us are). But with enough training and clear code-conventions (many of them coming from our community) ... our code base is quite manageable.

PS: I don't have anything against Java or Java programmers. I actually like it because of the available tools, libraries and because of the JVM, which is state-of-the-art.
Agree. Flag it instead.
Microsoft releases security guidelines for Agile
Bad or inappropriate software of all sorts can do that. Security software is no different.

My dad keeps trying to install security software which he discovers through pop-ups on Korean websites.

Fortunately, I bought him a Mac, and most of that stuff is a *.exe file. Unfortunately, this is not enough! :(
If a user has an account (e.g. to log in) then surely you can make them consent to cookies to track their login your terms of service?

Stil think it's a nonsense law though ..
I'll leave the roid rage against dynamic languages alone for now.

A good programmer beats a good <language> programmer IMHO.

I heartily disagree with this statement. I seriously doubt a good programmer can step into, say, C++ and work as effectively as they might in Java. They don't know how to manage memory well. They won't understand a lot of the nuances with pointers. They won't use a lot of the more subtle syntaxes a "good" C++ programmer will know. The same is true with Java or Python or (and I know this one from a good bit of experience) Ruby.

Knowing your tools well is essential. Being a generalist is great until you actually have to do something.
"I don't get how people think that not charging for something now will magically make the same people want to pay for it later"

It's not magic. If the upgrade adds value, they'll pay.

It's a marketing tactic which works for some and not for others.
The fact Java can be used like that, is irrelevant to the merits of the language.

Mibbit backend is about 20k LOC, and 72 lines of xml to get ant to do something useful.
I agree, I've spoken with someone from their developer relations and he quietly told me how much of a mess the AppStore department of Apple is. Everyone is running around like a chicken with their head cut off.

They made the AppStore by copy/pasting the music store, hence .99 pricing pressure and hit-driven nature that it's become. Sure, there was some planning and the iPhone truly is a brilliant device -- but the AppStore was not a deep thought.
Ugh! This is wrong, immoral and idiotic:

Using WebKit in PyQt4 we can write an app that will collect data of all ads on a webpage and parse the data for marketing guys .. [snip] .. Next stage will be to make application that will open ad URLs saved in DB

NO! Any half-decent ad-network will quickly detect the unusual clicking and will freeze the site owner's account (While still billing the advertiser for the click!) My ad engine will learn your behavior in about 5 clicks and after that, welcome to my de-optimization hell, hope you like PSAs, non-profits and humanitarian causes (until you became too much of a nuisance, then you're a "drop" rule in a proxy filter.)

If you're trying to explore an ad network's inventory for competitive advertiser poaching (you want to bring their advertisers to your site) you need to just save the banner ads and use actual humans to read the ad, google the firm and contact them. Every advertising link you see on line is a 302 redirect and someone is paying for it, usually the advertiser, and if you click on it fraudulently like this, both advertiser and publisher. Besides, don't refresh the same page; the ads to that page are already contextually targeted, and you only see matching assets. Instead, hit multiple pages on multiple sites, and each few times to get the big picture.

There is no bigger danger online than a moron with a "for" loop.
Fauxstalgia
I miss the 1920's...
I'd say it's mostly about your audience. Most people have flash installed and don't even know when they hit a flash page. For them, it's probably not a problem. If you want people to be able to view your app with a phone or from a non-MS OS (flash for Linux and OSX is still really bad), then plain HTML/JS might be the way to go.

I personally don't have flash installed anywhere but on a win7 VM that I rdesktop into when I really want to see something that's trapped by flash. That doesn't happen too often, so most flash pages are lost to me. I'm pretty sure I'm in a tiny minority though, and for the most part people really don't seem to mind flash apps.
Are there any resources about how to effectively communicate with the press from a small company/academia point of view?
I use ClamX AV. I have it set to do scans of new Downloads and scans late at night. I have no problems at all.
Neither the linked article, nor the "continuously updated FAQs" explain why they are closing.

What happened? Why are they closing?
Also, Wolfram Alpha results are more copyrightable because (in my experience) they're so off-the-wall and idiotic. Several precedents (remember the Seinfeld Aptitude Test case?) have shown that fictional facts can be copyrighted even though facts can't be.

<emoticon needed here>
I'm just bored of the endless fashion strutting that goes on recently in programming. I think it's irrelevant and tiring.

If a language solved a problem 5 years ago, it'll solve the same problem today. It won't die unless something else is found that solves the problem in a better way.
Yes, but that has problems too, as I pointed out in my previous post:

> Finding the reporters may be hard, and even if they are inclined to comment on when they found it, you can't really trust them, since their incentives aren't clear either. They may love the browser, or hate it...
It's a tough call. You don't want to optimize too prematurely for scaling, because the kind of system that would work effectively for a nationwide chain would likely be a very poor fit for a single store or small regional chain. My guess is that a more valuable trait would be an aggressive willingness for the business to 'kill its darlings' and break from processes that can't scale, rather than falling prey to the psychology of previous investment and chasing its losses.
>School, they say, is a rigorous academic and social training ground for the world of adults and employment.

School is a slave-labor camp whose purposes are 1) to keep the kids off the streets and out of the labor force and 2) to provide jobs for union teachers. Academics are an afterthought at best, usually not even that.
If it's built really well and has a reason for not being built in the normal sense then usually I, for one, dont mind.

The biggest problem I have is when an app could have been written in JS/Html and really all the flash does is make me wait while it loads :)
Sipping on Some Moonshine For Rails Deployments
2012 Prophecies Sparking Real Fears, Suicide Warnings
By "good programmer" I meant one that has experience of a wide variety of programming - memory management, pointers included.
Microsoft Exchange 2010: HELO New Architecture
Unveiling the Origins, Myths, Use and Benefits of Dynamic Languages [pdf]
Nothing in this article says anything about "dynamic languages". If anything, the author is in favor of Java. He simply suggests that it takes some of the features from C#, which is a very Java-like language, but hasn't been encumbered by the "Java ecosystem" (which is basically large IT companies that want to outsource everything to India, which is already trained to crank out Java 1.4.)

Static typing? who needs it. Lets write our own type checking all over the code.

You have to write your own type checking in Java, since any value can be either of the declared type or null. You know NullPointerException? That, my friend, is a runtime type error. (C# and Haskell both avoid that.)

Anyway, I could go on and on about language features that Java needs. But Scala implements them, so just look there.
I really like that credit-card form layout idea. Obvious in hindsight but not something I would have thought of myself.
If you can do it with DHTML do it that way, if not then try to keep it to a minimum.

Don't use flash where a standard solution suffices.
Yeah, why bother keeping up with advances in the field? Back in my day, sonny, we used our Java 1.4, and that's the way we likes it. Any new ideas should be immediately rejected as "fashion strutting", especially new ideas that have been successfully implemented in other languages for decades.
And what is this niche?
"On the other hand, an antivirus program with up-to-date signatures will protect you from a lot of threats. It'll protect you against viruses, against spyware, against Trojans -- against all sorts of malware. It'll run in the background, automatically, and you won't notice any performance degradation at all"

Now, this may be a bit off-topic, but does anyone know about which software he's talking ? I personally find that most of the virus scanners try desperately to let you know how effective they are, constantly notifying what they have done to help you, to validate their existence.

On the other hand, you have the more minimalistic virus scanners, like ClamAV, but I really can't tell if they're effective or not. I fear they are not.

Anyone has recommendations for a good virus scanner that doesn't suck ? Perhaps pg can make this a request for startups, please ? It's about time this whole industry stopped sucking. :)
Running a startup outside of the Valley
downvote him all you want, that was hilarious.
Naysayers, failures are part of the journey
It is all Canadian dollars, but they exchange rate is close to par and a six figure salary here is still still relatively large. It is interesting for students because we can see how much a particular professor is 'worth' to the university. I'm not sure if it has any effect on recruiting as the disclosure isn't all that well known.
Go on then... as I asked in another thread and you didn't reply, list out a few advances in the field of programming in the last 5 years.

Should we make CPU makers update their machine code as well every year or so to integrate all these programming discoveries?
I love it. I can't wait to see the moves they make.
Steve Yegge has an excellent blog post on "graceful overachievers." Steve makes a good point, but what makes his posting truly excellent is that he ripostes Joel Spolsky's old chestnut, "Smart, and Gets Things Done."

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...
Can you imagine someone 2 millennia from now finding Amelia Earhart? Will they even know who she was? Will they be able to figure out the purpose of the machinery around her, or will they be so far removed from the age of mechanical, piloted flight that they will have no context to understand what it is? Will there be enough left to determine that it was an airplane? Will they even believe we had the power of flight, before we ever had computers, scoffing, "how could they have flown? Such primitive people could never have managed all of the equations necessary for flight in their heads in real time."
But it's not code, so it doesn't need testing or documentation. Think of the time savings!
This is the frustrating thing with ESR: occasionally he has good points.

The problem is that they are often buried in narcissism, just like this essay, which is ironically claiming that he is not afflicted by such.

Basically it's the same thing that rubs me the wrong way with Timothy Ferriss -- sometimes there's useful stuff in there. His version, however, seems more playfully mischievous; he seems to be in on the joke.
But they do nothing but market the iPod Touch, which is nothing more than a crippled iPhone, as a hand-held gaming device. Big ol' Whiskey Tango Foxtrot on that one.
82 Billion objects in Amazon S3 in Q3 (up from 52B in Q1)
Maybe Hitchens should write a sequel: "God: The Ultimate Bubble".
Well I haven't used anti-virus in a long time since switching to OSX but when I was on Windows, I was always a big fan of ESET NOD32.
It's an interesting thought; though I suspect record keeping is good enough now not to lose track as much in the next 2 thousand years as we did in the last 2 :)
These comments by Guy Steele

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

on the LL-1 list seem to shed light on why Java has a hardwired "new".
Version controlled if you're lucky too!
It's funny how an article about Java the language comes up and almost every single comment here is attacking either the article or the language. Like it or not, Java is one of the most popular languages, so there are going to be a lot of people who want to improve it to make it more usable.

As the article said, Microsoft has proven with C# that you can take a language and evolve it over time for the better. If Java the language wants to be viable and keep up with what programmers want from a language, then it's going to have to release an update with changes like the ones outlined in the article. I think the article hit the nail on the head with some of Java's biggest problems (though not all). These changes would make it so that Java could be used in the way a lot of people want to use it.
IT consumerization and the future of work