skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Definitely going to be working through this. Looks like it's hitting the topics I want to hear about as I learn RoR. Thanks!
I'm trying to puzzle out the logic behind chipmakers' products being less reliable than the software that runs on them. Does the weakest link in the chain not break first?
Okay don't crucify me here... but am I the only one who thinks that this vague concept of privacy is overrated?

Everyone on the internet is so concerned about their stuff being "out there". What does that even mean? Tens of thousands of real-life strangers see your face, your children, your address every year. If I wanted to stalk a random person all day every day in real life, how much information could I gather? Who would find out?

For some reason it's scary to use Gmail, but it's fine to walk into your bank and hand over your entire financial history to a complete stranger. People fear the internet because they fear the unknown. Call me crazy, why don't we focus on actual issues instead? While you are wasting time complaining that Google "has your data", people are dying of heart diseases, hunger, AIDS, cancer, bad emo music, McDonald's, and car crashes, okay? People got real problems.

On the more practical side, I would argue that the real problem is not one of privacy, but one of security and common sense. Would you leave a diary of your secret thoughts sitting on your coffee table? Would you let a stranger store it for? Probably not. Then why would you put your private information on Google Docs or Facebook or your blog?

P.S. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the author actually argues that Google owes people something, besides great service. And for no other reason than to tip the balance of power away from itself, otherwise it's "evil". What?
Don't start a photo site- Flickr

Don't start a search engine- Google

Don't start a "social network"- Twitter

Don't start a dating site- OkCupid

Don't start a word processor- Zoho

Don't start a blogging site- Posterous

Don't start a storage site- Dropbox

Don't start a project manager- Basecamp
You can get it from the publisher ~$46 ($39.95 + $6SH):
http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/pw.html

You might also try a local brick and mortar bookstore.
20% of Angola's population is Chinese.

Do you have a citation of a source that says this? I just tried the usual kind of online sources for national population statistics for Angola, but I haven't found confirmation of this interesting statement.
And software that's orders of magnitude cheaper than it would be if error free.
I really, really hope that the team that's in charge of Apple's app review process doesn't start emulating these guys, with legal things instead of technical things. Though it seems like they kind of already have.
The Four General Perspectives of File Folder
Today file folders have made their significance renowned due to their four key elements i.e. design, print, concept and content. By employing customized file folders printing, you can definitely reap plenteous benefits at once. However you will have to understand their entire procedure so as to achieve your targets successfully.
The Obama people, in a much, much bigger test, found that having a video on their splash page decreased signups.
Good point. Facebook can't be all things to all people, so I definitively think there's room for niched community sites. Facebook hasn't crushed Flickr, for example.
So, basically ... everything is good enough and established enough. Don't try to improve or compete.

Yuck.
The flaw they're talking about is memory corruption (in this case an integer overflow).

The problem is that Win32 randomizes the heap to make exploitation of these flaws difficult.

The solution, which is clever, pivots on the idea of finding a global ("hard") memory leak and a "soft" memory leak . Soft leaks aren't really leaks, but rathe allocations with a lifetime under the control of the attacker; for instance, memory that won't be freed until after a connection is closed.

By making a pattern of allocations that brackets a "soft" leak with two "hard" links, an attacker can cause the Win32 allocator to free memory of a known size without that memory being merged into another block (because the adjacent blocks are leaked).

Because of the way Win32 caches free blocks, doing this means that an attacker can predetermine the size of a block that will be returned by the allocator, and can use that information to reliably overwrite heap metadata, and thus gain control over the process.
You'll travel on a ship fuelled by dead creatures carrying plastic items made from dead creatures, but you wont fuel your body with dead (macroscopic) creatures?
While the author says that GO is Object Oriented, I think the go language site http://golang.org/ implies that it is not object-oriented in the conventional sense. The author goes on to say "It is the lack of implementation inheritance that seems odd. Most of us are used to considering it as a necessary part of an OO language." suggesting that he is possibly presuming an Object Oriented approach.

Not all of the implementors of GO are fans of the Bjarne school of OO.
Did you read the same article I did?

This had little to do with competence! The team was successful because it grouped together some people who actually enjoyed their job. Individually, they were only slightly better at it than their peers; as a group of "like-minded individuals" (quoted from the article), they spent much more energy collaborating on ways to improve their software testing process.

"Like-minded" is only tangentially related to intelligence or competence or any of the other traits that arrogant people like to ascribe to themselves. It's really about people that have similar priorities and styles and work well together.
Cheers, thanks for that. I figured that was essentially the way to solve the problem. That said, I imagine that I'll be using a combination of both document stores and SQL databases on my next (largish) project.
Perhaps someone modified SCIgen for political opinion pieces? http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
I would definitely agree with this. I'd say the most important element of maximizing flow are the co-founders. Co-founders have a mindset such that they are willing to contribute wherever needed. By sharing the trivial, non-flow inducing tasks, everyone will be able to set aside blocks of time for tasks that do induce flow.

http://www.igeejo.com/blog/default/qnas/18#disqus_thread
Also they all run adblock etc.
This is definitely the best rails tutorial I've seen. Congrats Michael. Awesome job!
Could you be more specific, please? I too think YC backing can be a great advantage, but surely it's not impossible to »make something people want« without it.
EC2 isn't the fastest, I'll admit. What makes EC2 a great choice for a hosting platform is that it is fairly consistent, stable, well-documented, and allows you to experiment much more rapidly than really any other option. If you go with dedicated hosting, you better hope you set everything up properly with the right balance of CPU/Memory/Disk the first time, or you've got to make expensive, painful changes to your infrastructure.
Easy Money: Create super basic .NET website
Create a link sharing, members only, web site.

Note: This is a very simple job but it needs to be completed within the next 24hrs. I will pay 120$.

A. There should be eight tabbed pages in the members area categorized as follows.
Tab 1 = Artificial Intelligence
Tab 2 = Mobile Computing
Tab 3 = Robotics
Tab 4 = The Singularity
Tab 5 = Programming
Tab 6 = Software Watch
Tab 7 = Hacks & Mods
Tab 8 = Gadget Hunter

B. Members should be able to view, add, edit, and delete links under each category.

C. At least 2 of the following .net controls must be used: gridview, detailsview, formview, repeater, datalist.

D. The site should be password protected, allow new users to sign up, provide a full navigation system, use a Master page, and usercontrols.

All other details are left to developers discretion.

Take job and be paid through Elance.
For questions email recontemplations@gmail.com
I smell something fishy.
As the saying goes: "that's awesome, if only it worked on IE6..."
What class is this for?
Previously, [Michael] taught theoretical and computational physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for six years, where he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000. Michael is a graduate of Harvard College, has a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Y Combinator program.

man, I guess my stereotype that it's mostly non-academic programmers who wouldn't know a heap from a hash-table which are drawn to web-dev is a little out of date...
> She just needs a dead simple CRUD app, like rails on top of a simple sqlite scehma

No she doesn't. She needs Access because her needs are exactly what it's designed for.
Schneier's response to Eric Schmidt
I was literally amazed by how well this played - everything was really well done even under the slower internet explorer javascript interpreter. What I really loved was that the smoothness difference between this and say a flash game is hardly noticeable.
The amount of data and power that Google has is absurd. Their reach is global, their influence is unparalleled. On top of that, they are a for-profit company. They have to worry about shareholders, competition, innovation, pleasing their customers, and feeding their employees. They have every right to fight tooth and nail for every penny they're capable of earning...

...and yet they don't. Google is quite Good in many scenarios where they could easily get away with being Evil. You've implied that they have "tunnel vision towards the bottom line", but I think you'd be hard-pressed to support that point.
In addition to what danielrhodes says in his reply about corporate IT departments having legitimate reasons not to upgrade - I'd like to add that my biggest pet peeve is when someone asks me to see if I can fix their computer, and it's obvious that every IT-enthusiast before me has insisted that this person switch to -INSERT BROWSER HERE-. I helped a gentleman last week that used MSN because he found it intuitive, but had Firefox, Opera, Chrome and IE installed. Then there was the mountain of anti-spyware software everyone had installed. After uninstalling the browsers he didn't like or use (despite them being "better" according to most IT professionals) and uninstalling the spyware blockers, his computer worked just fine.

We need to remember that our job is to make the computer better for other people - not just ourselves. I'm amazed at the rate of development I've seen in browser technology, but let's not forget the millions of people that just want to get online and send an email. If we rush to upgrade everyone to "better" technology - we might end up ruining their experience.
It doesn't actually benefit anyone to convince people that anthropogenic climate change exists unless anthropogenic climate change actually exists. In fact, it's a huge pain in the ass for everyone. It doesn't even help the political classes, because they have to waste political capital pursuing this issue rather than the half dozen other things they could worry about. However, it's in the direct benefit of oil companies to convince people that anthropogenic climate change doesn't exist. One side has motives and vested interests to lie, the other really does not.

Incidentally...

Consider finally that it is serving as the basis to justify potential government intervention and control in the most minute details of what used to be considered every citizen's private life (the size of our cars, how many times we flush the toilet, whether we use this or that substance for this or that purpose).

Perhaps the largest proposed government intervention does nothing of the kind: it simply addresses the externality of greenhouse gases by submitting them to the same kind of cap-and-trade system we have for sulphur dioxide. Rather than addressing specific regulations for fuel consumption and energy usage, this would simply restrict the amount of greenhouse emissions Americans can produce so that ordinary market forces would apply this pressure as efficiently as possible. If you really object to those kind of regulations, support cap and trade. I honestly see no good rationale for any type of conspiracy theory about scientists being government lackeys for some sort of arbitrary statist takeover of your SUV and toilet.
I grew up in a relatively poor family in a third world country (in a rural area). So, don't make baseless assumptions.

Correction: You know nothing about poverty in the United States.

These (healthcare, education, etc...) are privileges. You are lucky to have it – but it is still a privilege and not something that you can demand.

The discrete right/privilege distinction is a meaningless distraction from the more subjective issue of social justice. If the resources exist to give everyone healthcare, then everyone should have healthcare. If the resources don't exist, well... there's no such thing as a right to something that doesn't exist. Obviously, no one has the right to live to be 200. On the other hand, we shouldn't have people dying of third-world diseases in the U.S. just to keep insurance bureaucrats rich; that's not a reasonable trade-off.

Guess what, hospitals and doctors do not just pop into existence. They have to be paid and everything costs money. You want all this to be free (at least for you).

Wrong. I want to pay for it through the tax system. We're spending trillions on "defense"; why not spend money to be defended against things like cancer, which are far more likely to kill most of us than any terrorist?

It looks like everyone wants free healthcare and no-one wants to pay for it.

Ridiculous assertion. No one with half a brain considers that possible. Someone has to pay.

It seems that the list of entitlements only gets longer and the list of responsibilities gets shorter.

That's what happens as society improves. On the list of responsibilities shrinking: are you arguing that we should go back to an era when people spent a substantial fraction of their time making their own clothes, instead of buying cheap factory-made clothing at the store?

Wasn’t the USA founded on the principle that everyone can pursue their happiness? It seems more like you want government to guarantee it.

The idea that the government could guarantee anything about a person's emotional state is patently ridiculous, and you know this.

Also, how can someone pursue happiness if he can't afford treatment for basic medical conditions, and can't work because, untreated, that condition is too painful? People wouldn't get into messes like this in a more reasonable society.
The bidding seems like a complete lottery. What may work well one day, may completely fail the next. You could be throwing money away.

It's a sort of interesting idea, but completely impossible to calculate ROI etc before you spend.

Also, WTH "only accepting US credit cards." Hate it when sites pull that one.
I like this too, but it's worth noting two things:

1) this is from 2007

2) Real World Haskell (which is authored in part by dons) recommends against using fail, and it's much more recent.

From http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/monads.html :

Warning - Beware of fail

Many Monad instances don't override the default implementation of fail that we show here, so in those monads, fail uses error. Calling error is usually highly undesirable, since it throws an exception that callers either cannot catch or will not expect.

Even if you know that right now you're executing in a monad that has fail do something more sensible, we still recommend avoiding it. It's far too easy to cause yourself a problem later when you refactor your code and forget that a previously safe use of fail might be dangerous in its new context.
I'm currently 100% self-employed, working on two businesses: one in IT consulting for individuals and companies, and one in news aggregation and publishing (which has been suffering lately but is about to get a shot in the arm again).

First, the bad stuff that I don't like: I haven't had a real vacation in quite a while; any money that I make has to go back into the business, so I'm perpetually poor; I work long hours and most days of the week; I am on the front-lines, dealing with the frustrations that various technologies bring to the people trying to use them.

So it's not all roses, but I do still prefer it to a regular job. For one thing, if I make a stupid decision -- and I often do! -- I can clean it up. My businesses are limited only by what I'm willing to achieve. I have done some pretty good things for my clients, and that's rewarding by itself.

The one advice-y lesson I've learned so far: GET HELP. I was struggling with the consulting business, and then Leslie (my girlfriend) started helping out, and it's made a tremendous difference. Now my billing is mostly on time, there's someone that knows what my expenses and revenues look like, and she's running around behind me keeping my head screwed on straight. :-)

Additionally I've hired a tech (twice), and it's valuable getting someone else's point of view and experience involved, so long as you're willing to give them some pretty clear rules at the beginning and then get out of their way.
A Dynamic Map of the Cash Allowance Rebate Systems (CARS)
have you noticed how most flash sites make you wait to load, then put an intro,then when you go in, you have to wait for the site to load again. Then the whole page is about 800x600, and you have to keep clicking to see 10% of what you could normally see on a normal website. I think they also deliberately make all those flash page scrollers narrower than possible.
You provide the connection to twitter/facebook, but users really won't do that until they want to -- until they have a reason to. Let them save something or create something on your site, interact with it somehow, and then to have it the same when they come back later, they have to register. Your homepage right now just consists of buttons to sign up and buttons to register. There's no "Try it now" and there should be.
I accidentally upvoted you, so I feel I have to weigh in here.

I find you greatly oversimplify in order to prevent your own understanding of the greater issues involved.

Let's assume for a moment that every American is totally dedicated to helping his fellow man as much as possible. Would that necessarily result in free public healthcare? It's a perfectly reasonable (yet unpopular view) to think that helping other people means doing the things that result in the greater, longer-term good, and that might mean make life miserable. Humanity that struggles is humanity that innovates, adapts, and evolves. Humanity that stagnates does not. There is a very good case to be made for inaction.

It's also quite ludicrous to think that, given the inclination to take some sort of direct action in my fellow man's affairs that _you_ get to define what the appropriate sort of action might be. Perhaps instead of a free doctor, I feel that a cash stipend might be best, where the recipient gets to choose how it is spent. Or, perhaps because I think poor people have poor spending habits, I choose to provide free shelter. To even start thinking along the lines that one solution would fit all problems is to engage in the most wide over-generalizations. And to think that you (or anybody else) gets to decide what this one solution would be and basically try to shame everybody else into accepting this one answer is a non-starter. Reasonable people are going to tell you to go jump in a lake.

Finally, it's completely disconnected to think that my actions have a direct result on other people's lives. People have a dignity and respect that is part of who they are, foibles and all. My writing a check doesn't make a person into a better one, doesn't necessarily improve their life, and might actually make their problems worse. People are who they are. Even when I'm committed to action, even when I've decided to take direct action, even when I think I know what the best action is, I take action because it is the right thing to do for me, not because I'm expecting some sort of miracle result from it.

Having said that, I think there is a strong moral case for some sort of catastrophic health insurance -- mainly because people cannot be allowed to forfeit their life savings because they had the misfortune to die from expensive diseases. However, I respect that others might choose to let each man fend for himself. This country was founded by people braving the wilds, not hanging out at the soup kitchen. As a species, in my opinion, the more comfortable we make our cave, the less likely we ever are to venture out of it (travel to the stars)
"it seems to me that an asymptomatic HSV carrier cannot infect anyone"

Smacks forehead ... That is one of the big reason herpes is so wide spread. It gets pased on by people that aren't having, and may never have, an outbreak.
I learned why publishers still employ editors.
I don't think that's likely to be an issue in this case because the ads are not presented in a standard ad format, instead they are part of the usual list of reddit items.
Yeah but if you want your ad to show to more than one person, pretty soon it becomes effectively saturated.
If you care about IE6 these days, and aren't selling to corporate users forced to use it, then you're doing something wrong.

Also, you can just enable it when it's available, and fallback to comet etc when it's not.
As a guy with a systems programming background, I just love how pragmatic the rails community and its texts are.

The book I'm going through now includes a chapter on behaviour driven development, an appendix with a crash course in ruby and another appendix with a crash course in DB design.

I love the ethos of giving you the 80% you'll need frequently and then telling you where to go find the rest. It's making learning web app development so much easier.

Rails guys seem to love getting going fast and it makes it so much more compelling to learn.
Sure would like to try this out, but I'm getting 503 Service Unavailable when I try to put in my CC info...

(edit: seems to have been fixed now)
There's a pharmacophobia joke in here somewhere.
To quote Paul Buchheit, all such 'advice' is just someone's limited life experience expressed as a set of over-generalizations. If it was really this simple, VCs would have success rates upwards of 90%.

All said, I can understand how someone who reads proposals for a living could come off sounding jaded. It's pretty easy to pass judgment, especially from the sidelines.
I really like this quote:

If you needed any more reason to believe that the traditional model of science and peer review, a system closely guarded from the tyranny of outsiders and their unending and infernal questions, is dead you might simply indulge in the realization that obfuscation is simply the last fig-leaf these institutions have left to cling to and reflect on the fact that in the 240 hours following the leak more pure knowledge and analysis was made available to the public than in the 24 years prior.

In general I haven't been too interested in the drama that has been going on in relation to the "Warmergate" thing, but I do like that there is a renewed interest in the actual data involved and integrity of the science.
I believe the guys at ABTests.com would encourage readers to consider the results on the site, to evaluate whether or not running a similar test would make sense for their own site, to then run a test, and to then post the results at ABTests.com. Everyone would benefit from the same test running on multiple sites, to see whether the results are universal or not.

I'm sure they don't think that a featured test would result in identical results on a different site. But opening up data like this for peer review and replication is a good thing.

Edit: Oh. dcancel said as much, just above this.
Bionic Fingers Give Amputees New Dexterity
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/prodigits-bionic-fingers/
New drive to harness wave power