skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good summary of the delta.

However, the article author didn't really explain why strict mode is interesting. One of the core requirements of ECMAScript 3.1 (now 5) was to make the language more secure.

For example, in strict mode you can't declare new variables which are eval'd. This makes it harder to XSS. As does the reservation of eval (so it can't be overridden) and the denial of access to the global object.

This is really important because using strict will not only make your JavaScript better (more like "The Good Parts") but also more performant (less global scope) and more secure.
How to Remove SafetyAntiSpyware | TechJaws.com
Must-Have R Packages for Social Scientists 
A list of the top ten R packages for social science research
Some contracts, though, fall under what's called the "statute of frauds" - that means they must be written to become contracts.
From the link you provide, it explains that the statue of frauds makes a contract voidable (either party can break it) but it's still a contract.
Also: 'Sometimes, a party to a contract that would otherwise be invalid under a "statute of frauds" will nonetheless be able to enforce it, on the basis of "partial performance" or "promissory estoppel".'
Seems TechCrunch can reasonably claim partial performance.
Guys, I didn't write that story to show off. Sorry if it comes out this way. Of course tons of people here did much more impressive things. I see a lot of people who want to do something like start a business or change career and they get discouraged by everyone saying it's hard and not worth doing. I just wanted to motivate them and tell them that it doesn't matter what others are saying.

And I had a girlfriend at 14 who by the end of high school messed me so much that I spent first 2 years in college avoiding girls completely. But that's not a Hacker News story ;)
Well... Not only he didn't get that much burned, he is suing Fusion Garage out of existence.

And, unless most of the article is correct, he is also slandering them pretty bad.
From what I can see, the story is far too murky to make any intelligent observations about third-party IP rights at this point.

Generally speaking, if a third-party contractor did work on the project, that party could potentially have IP rights to its work, but not if it did so as a work-for-hire and assigned rights to whoever retained it. If there were no work-for-hire or IP assignments, then any contractor that might have done software development or hardware design could potentially assert infringement claims if its IP is used without benefit of a license agreement to the party using it.

Without further details, though, it is impossible to assess this.
"This must be carefully nurtured by management"

Aren't these managers wonderful people?
Thanks, that shoulda been in the list.
[Not converging on SQL] only makes life harder for everyone.

No, it makes life harder for people trying to use off-the-shelf ORMs and other RDBMS tools. I would much rather make life harder for them than make it harder for the developers of these databases.

I don't see anything bad about SQL (the language) that would prevent it from taking this role.

I, for one, do not think that it is expressive enough to cover all of the different paradigms being explored. It is based on a row/column view of the data that may not be appropriate and which may require additional hoops to be jumped through in order to get the data presentable for the assumptions that SQL makes. Who would be responsible for these transformations? IMHO it should be the end-user, but if SQL gains traction any time soon the db developers will be repeatedly browbeaten by DBAs who can't comprehend why anyone would not share their viewpoints regarding data structuring and could you please make things look like the RDBMs systems we are used to kthxbye...

Adding SQL seems to offer very little at this point except future headaches.
> "why on earth is someone learning Perl in 2009"

Pick any of copious documentation, more jobs available than for Python and Ruby combined, availability on almost any platform you're likely to encounter, a testing culture unmatched by any other language of which I'm aware, and ~19,224 individual distributions freely available, installable, and usable from the CPAN.
One of the obstacles is security. Programmers don't have the rights to even see their software in production environments. Designers and testers have access only to small (often not representative) subsets of data, and it's different subsets than the users see. Moving data from one system to another isn't easy when you don't have anyone who has enough access to look at the data in both systems.
He is just making sure Fusion Garage can't raise the money to defend themselves against Arrington.
Coincidentally, it looks quite like Firefox's logo to me ;)
Ah, I remember doing that, and writing code on paper. I had a green Mead spiral notebook full of TI-BASIC code. Then I would sit and type it into the computer (a TI99) and then save it to tape... which was an actual audio cassette tape, in a separate tape player, with the mic input shoved up next to the computer's speaker.

My dad and his friend, who also had a TI99 would transmit programs back and forth to each other over the 2 meter HAM bands late at night. One of them would hold the radio mic keyed next to the computer's speaker and the other would be holding the radio speaker up to the mic input on the computer.
Deconstructing the Publishing Houses stupidity
His blog is completely focused on public health so it seems reasonable that he frames his response in those terms (i.e. what serves the public purpose and public health). He made several points about the study: that it didn't say anything that wasn't known (i.e. Tamiflu is of limited value); their methodology was murky; and the way it was handled by the BMJ contributed to sensationalizing the story in a way that might make Tamiflu not used in situations where it would have some value. Seems like a valid point to say that there's an impact on public health.
Chip Morningstar wrote a nice piece about this idea a few years ago: http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-ration...
The market doesn't have to grow by 2 * PI anything. It's just a constant. Since the radius grows linearly, you can map any linearly growing series of data and you'll find it looks good in this presentation format.
In my experience, this is all to often the truth:

"There is also the problem that programmers tend to be somewhat faddish. It is not uncommon for them to recommend a solution that is technically fashionable, not necessarily what's practical. An elegant solution to the wrong problem solves nothing. It is important for programmers to learn to justify their technical recommendations from a business perspective. Failure to do so will inevitably result in a costly decision."
Assuming you work in the security side of tech, would it be possible to ask you a few questions regarding your career? I'm confused about starting my own. :-)
Having seen further Apple statements today I agree with you. Nokia is looking for a way in to the Apple patents.
And someone will eventually do the same to you. Be flattered when it happens.
I know it differs from the whole internet-connected/constant monitoring solution, but there is a device that you can use to do this manually called the Kill A Watt:
http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-...
The growth of the size of an arc is only misleading because the graph naturally draws you to compare different browsers as a percentage of the market.

Since the market has grown basically linearly, the arcs may actually be in direct proportion to the actual number of users, in which case there is very real growth.

The confusion comes when you see growth of absolute terms when the more interesting statistic is what the relative growth is.

Particularly, if one browser's arc remained the same size on each ring you might assume that it is staying the same. It has the same number of users, but it is losing prominence.
Ok, can anyone smarter than myself tell me if I'm justified in getting a little bit excited about the 'freeze' function on objects that makes properties read only? My first thought is that it sounds like a perfect first line of defence in terms of being able to get trustworthy data back from the client bundled up in a frozen object.
While the article is obviously made by a jackass, it's understandable given the following statement: "In reality there is only a handful of true programming geniuses in the field who are either independent contractors or are employed by computer hardware/software firms. There are few, if any, true programming geniuses in the average corporate shop."

I might agree with that statement.
FrumiOS: a simple object-system for Clojure
Aging Gracefully & Morality ,External,Internal Processes of yoga
This is a good one to be sure. Also, check out QueryPath (http://querypath.org/).
You're right, just need to multiply by some scaling factor, as long as the growth stays linear.
Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"
From the site:

Coding Horror experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech.

I have some backups and I'll try to get it up and running ASAP!
Coding Horror experienced 100% data loss
Automatically by a pileon of user flagging or by manual moderator action?
The patent system: End it, don't mend it
When journalists go on a talk show to promote their new book, we don't expect them to also list the reasons we should not buy it.
tl;dr: built tacky MySpace themes sites, promoted them by paying "MySpace whores" with 10,000s of friends to post bulletins, got in early with Yahoo!'s beta ad program when they were massively overpaying, made at peak $200,000 a month, blew a TON of money on cars, a house etc, redesigned the site (and permanently deleted the old one) without realising that changing his URLs would kill his Google rank, blew $30,000 on SEO experts, none of whom apparently told him he should set up redirects, ended up selling the MySpace site for $75,000, still has the house.
It sounds like the servers weren't actually ruined, so commenter was implying that there was no actual loss.

What stuck me as odd about the story is how "2 racks" of "beige boxes and randomly built servers" could come anywhere close to being as valuable as people's salaries.

I think if people are getting laid off, it would happen one way or another, regardless of the insurance money..
I'd really like to get some honest feedback, if at all possible.
A very successful CEO told me that contracts were just a formality. If you don't trust the other party to do their end you should not be doing business with them. Sounds like there was a lot of reason not to trust the Fusion Garage guys.
IIRC, Firefox extensions are Javascript+XML... so shouldn't there be a garbage collector for 'memory leaks?' Or are we also including 'run-away memory usage' as 'leaks?'
>"I do not think these points are as mind-shattering to the average geek as the author seems to believe. Marketing is not intrisically scummy and scammy? You don't say! Marketing need not be deceptive? What a concept!"

So all you really have is a different set of stereotypes about geeks than the author has. Who's right?

I'm starting to think the question "what is a geek" is the ultimate elephant of our time - no two geeks anywhere are feeling the same body part. (No jokes, please.) We all mistake our own local, small sample sets for the totality, and anyone who tries to make a general assertion just gets picked apart by a million people who have exceptions to bring up.

It's distressing to me, because we need powerful marketing conversations, and conversations that are all about exceptions aren't very powerful.
i truncated it since I kept hitting the topic character limit.
It's not the sort of thing I like to read, but still, it makes me cringe in sympathy.

/me does a git pull from his weblog
Hypothesis: Democratic governments make bad decisions in the face of popular panic. Hypothesis 2: Interested actors often try to stoke popular panic to get governments to make rash decisions that benefit themselves.
There is a phone for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_FONE_F3
In terms of absolute information, how much does that add up to?
Yah, I'm aware of that and thought about raising the point.

The joy of an article is that someone actually spends time "editing" the interesting information into something readable. The transcript is a bit of a poor substitute.
Oooh neat. Maybe I should claim that the parts of the ES3.1 standard I didn't implement were actually presaging ES5. Neat.
That's exactly why I found the full talks! Haven't watched them all yet, will report back.

Edit: Not sure. He didn't mention it in one of the video clips, but may eb addressed in the full audio.
Did he steal that quote from Picasso?
The fact that it's in audio is nice too. If something is only in video is demands your full attention, but something that is in audio you can multi-task while listening to. (Maybe it's only me, but I really find it hard to watch video and do something else at the same time unless the video is completely and utterly boring)
Ask HN: Suggestions for simple, cheap Workers Comp for CA office staff?
I need to quickly acquire some simple, inexpensive Workers Comp insurance for some office staff in California. Any suggestions?

Intuit's "pay as you go" service looks interesting http://payroll.intuit.com/workerscomp/ but I'm interested in your experiences and suggestions.
Intuit's URL: http://payroll.intuit.com/workerscomp/
It seems to be based on this dataset, which doesn't provide a breakdown of Firefox versions: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Note that this is from w3schools.com, not w3.org (a completely different site). This is for a web developer audience, so it kind of makes sense; from a developer point of view there are much bigger differences in standards compliance between IE versions than between Firefox versions. But mostly they just seem to want to keep a small number of columns on that page.
This is indeed what I call CODING HORROR!!
http://code.google.com/p/phpquery/ This also seems interesting.
So I found this article very much with the way I see banks and financial systems. Being that I never worked on financial IT system this was just my hunch. But, hearing accounts of what was going on it sounded like people were making decisions on very little data, or that the data wasn't available to them. When the crisis hit I kept thinking over and over that this could all have been avoided if things were more transparent. The SEC is at best over burdened and probably more likely gamed. The oversight we have doesn't work, and every time we talk about reform bankers moan and complain you'll ruin everything. I call bullshit.

Given the proper financial data anyone could evaluate the risk of a company. It's not rocket science. It's all a bunch of electronic data. We need to rethink regulation. We need to transitions from auditors, committees and the SEC to financial transparency. We should be able to see every trade, every position, every loan, CDOs, and derivatives a company owns, trades, etc. Everything can be tracked and examined because it's just a bunch of electrons. If this sort of system existed it would be virtually free to conduct an audit, or monitor for manipulation. It benefits both the CEO and SEC. CEO's have better insight into what's going on inside their companies, and the SEC can make sure they aren't manipulating markets or doing risky things at any moment. Instead of sending out a fleet of auditors, relying on Sarbox, etc.

There's no excuse for bad loans being made. I kept hearing of loan evaluators being told to pass bad loans just because Wallstreet wanted to securitize them. That's ridiculous, and if they were doing that we should be able to see it in plain view. Loan packages can be graded by a computer, the only thing a human should be doing is checking for fraud at the most. And remember the bang up job Moody's did rating the pile of junk. Their failings seemed like just total lack of knowledge about what they were doing.

Which got me thinking why can't we automate the stress test on banks? If we had such a system then we could take all of the financial data from every institution into one big simulation. Simulate future financial products and their impact before we create them. Test out what could happen in the market if we introduce this. Play out what if scenarios. If we could do that then would we need an army of auditors, and more overhead the banks don't want. Light weight bureaucracy not over burdened with check marks, auditors, committees, and SEC filings.
Keep in mind that this is a tech demo used to show a visualization of someone else's data (W3C in this case). So the author likely cared a lot more for visual appear and demonstrating functionality than for the way the graph might be interpreted.
$25,000 (according to the transcript.)
This graph does not repeat not show global browser market share. It is for traffic to the w3.org website. Any comparisons to global browser trends (PI*2 growth, etc) or "wars" is not meaningful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
VIM Hacks
what happened in early 2008?

the empty space, which i believe is "other browsers" grow a lot then.
Or rather, HOSTING HORROR.
Not only that, but the dataset doesn't have even time spacing. In the earlier years, it skipped a couple months, and only recently did it start to do every month.

However, that's not reflected in the visualization, and we're lead to believe that this is sampled with even steps over time.
I don't know what the Nokia's patents are but what I know is that about the time a company begins to sue other companies means they've fallen behind on the market. And this has indeed been true for Nokia for some time.

Had Gandhi lived in the late 20th centry, his quote would probably be: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they sue you. Then you win."
"looks like it's 100% internet search caches for recovery. Any tips on recovering images, which typically aren't cached?"

This does not sound like the tweet of a man with backups.
Let me get this right: the guy who ran a site whose entire purpose is to make fun of other people's poor programming practices has no external backups?
By your logic, we should not learn C because it's older than Perl and Python (why on earth is someone learning C in 2009).
Why Facebook and Google hate privacy
To be fair, Atwood thought his hosting provider (CrystalTech) was backing up his system. As it turns out, their entire VM backup solution failed silently, so everyone thought the backups were being made.

If anything, I'd say this is a sign not to work with CrystalTech.
I read this article 2 days ago on a flight from CA to Chicago. Sounded completely plausible.

All I could think was "if you think this is bad, wait until you see what's under the hood in healthcare management and healthcare reimbursement."
I would toss Safari out of that group. As the default Mac browser its user base is going to include a significant chunk of people who just use it because it's there -- which is the same as the ignorant ie user.

Lately it seems that every quarter Apple announces better computer sales...they are expanding their market to more and more home users who are going be 'less internet savvy.' Call it the halo effect or just a better product, but Apple defines mainstream retail computer sales right now. See http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10409462-37.html
"ugh, server failure at CrystalTech. And apparently their normal backup process silently fails at backing up VM images."

http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/6573094832
I have a beta account but I have not yet used it very much because I have CouchDB running on two of my own servers, and usually on my laptop.

Except for not really being able to do ad-hoc queries (you write map/reduce view functions which create indices) I like CouchDB. That said, I use MongoDB a little more frequently because it is easier for me to use.

What I really like about CouchDB is the way it uses REST and JSON. I use Ruby clients, and sometimes I prefer to just use simplehttp and json gems, and do everything low level because it feels natural.
[snarky comment deleted because it looks like Jeff doesn't actually have the backup he thought he had and damn, I feel for the guy]
I started in BASIC on a Sharp MZ-700 (a horrible machine) but in 1988 I got a Commodore 64 as a gift, along with a book (Programming the 6502) and got to grips with assembly after a christmas present: a freezer cartridge and a floppy disk drive. It was the best christmas present ever.

Further on, my C64 interest became an obsession and I dropped out of school - though passing some exams - and even led to me hacking PBX's and blue boxing across the USA (I live in the UK). But again - I don't regret any of it!
eh?

This is not the same. If the journalist wrote about his book in his own column would be the same. Arrington didnt go to gigaom to talk about crunchpad, He is using his own platform to talk about his own project, for the last year or so. Most of the time good things about it.
I don't think that was the main purpose of his blog. I'd point you to some of his posts supporting this, but... :)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual: Interference with Organizations and Production
Need Terms of Service? Try Google.
egads... methinks CrystalTech will be experiencing a mass exodus.

[Also makes me wonder how to test my host's backups]
I want to make a snarky comment, but I just feel for the guy.
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It's not a backup if it's in the same location and managed by the same process.
If the patient is paying, then why shouldn't he be making the decision?

I'd certainly hope the MD would provide guidance in that decision, since it's the MD who knows what the costs and benefits are. But the MD knows neither the patient's marginal valuation of the costs, nor of the benefits. That is, he doesn't know how precious each dollar is to the patient, nor the fact that, e.g., he is resigned to his terminal illness but just wants to live long enough to see his daughter graduate.

Since nobody else knows how much those things are worth to the patient, nobody is qualified to balance them.

Most especially not politicians, who ought not to have a horse in the race at all. The availability of the treatments ought to be metered by the price of providing them versus the patient's (or the patient's contracted insurance provider's) willingness to pay (given an understanding of the treatment as guided by the MD). Period.
I've been using this for some serious scraping recently... dozens of threads scraping for 5, 6 days at a time.

Very good application, but watch out for memory leaks. Leaks like a sieve when you miss a ->clear() call in your destructors if you're not using the circular reference detection feature in the 5.3 garbage collector.
H1-B visas snapped up despite recession
I have an opposite impression. It could be that Arrington, seeing the business relationship went bust and that he made little to no contribution to the device and thus has little to no rights on it, decided to attempt to get FG's work for free, by suing them out of business and forcing a settlement on his terms.

I expect him to be able to prove that FG has and continues to engage in shady deals.

Actually, I hope not. I would love to see him fight off a slander lawsuit.
So, if anyone here has comments, critiques or suggestions for improvement, I'm listening. ;-)
Well - he is human though he can have a new site now called "backup horrors". All kidding aside - this is horrible. How many people validate their backups on a regular basis? (even once a year)
This is why I like restoring my backup slice every so often, just to make sure it's there. A couple years ago I had to use archive.org as my external backup, and it wasn't fun.