skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An insurance policy is equivalent to an offsite backup? So you don't have any personal items of any intrinsic value at all; you could lose it all, get a cheque in return, and be happy? Wow. Well, awesome, but I doubt that is common.

And look, I agree with you in many ways - people need to take responsibility for their own backups, sure. But there is a division of responsibility. I mean, even if all my backups are 100% perfect, I am still trusting the hosting provider to, well, keep the power on. Pay the peering bill. Keep the server temp down. Not go bankrupt tomorrow.

You can just follow this chain as far as you want. Whether you like it or not, you're utterly dependent on the DNS root server admins. There is nothing at all you can do to prepare yourself for their failure. I bet you can't generate your own electricity or grow your own food, either.

All of civilisation is built on co-dependency and delegation of responsibility. It's the only way to do anything complex. At some point, you must delegate. Atwood should have checked - but he was paying his host to do it. That's like having an employee whose job it is to do backups. At some point, you just have to let go and trust them. Otherwise you can never really do anything; you're caught up in checking minutia; I can give examples of this kind of leadership failure until my keyboard breaks.
See, this is what happens when you're too sensitive for your own good. People's reaction has been far too simplistic to this. Do people really think, in this day and age that their emails and searches are guaranteed to stay private? How much of naive fool do you have to be?

Mr Schmidt is completely correct. If you have something to hide, you should first consider why you have to hide it. And when you feel you should hide it, you shouldn't be using internet search engines or cloud services to do it because they offer no guarantee of your privacy. Not because the service itself is grepping your data looking for blackmail material, but because the government requires access to their data in certain instances. This is as true of Microsoft as it is on google as it is of joe-blow cloud-based y-combinator funded service.

If you're doing something you don't want to government finding out about, don't do it on the internet without major safeguards in place. period. End of story.
I don't know about the other browsers, but Mozilla's plans are here: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/JavaScript/ECMAScript_5_sup...

In summary, some Mozilla JS extensions from Firefox 3.0 have been adopted into ECMAScript. Some ECMAScript 5 APIs have been added to Firefox 3.5, but not all of them. All the browser vendors have put a lot of effort into ECMAScript 5, so I'd expect they're willing to actually implement it, too.
Yeah... look how well that works for the US auto industry. Hey, maybe we could fail too & get a bailout!
No, C is different.

Look, Perl was "the" fad language back in the 90s. No-one is building anything new with it today. So if you learn Perl, expect to be hired to maintain others' crappy sites.

C is different because it's the foundation everything else is built on.

I'm not trying to dis Perl here or anything; I'm just trying to state the nature of reality as I see it, so lower your spear, friend ..
Yeah, but what kind of jobs? Building something new?

Look, I am not attacking Perl. I am just stating the reality that in 2009, a Perl job will be maintenance. There is nothing new. This might be very insulting but that's the simple fact.

I know of about 4 big new projects happening in this city using Rails. I don't know about other cities but i assume it is similar. Learn Rails, right now, is my sincere advice, offered in good faith.
Mises' stance is especially notable in contrast to the insanity of Galambosianism
Their role in making him look foolish (what I said, incidentally) is indeed quite minor. If he'd actually done the things he advocated and, frankly, implied that he'd done, he'd still have his images, his downtime would have been close to zero and he'd probably get to write a triumphant article about the value of following his own sage advice.

Someone else pointed out in another comment, there's a good analogy to be drawn to Atwood's own words here:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001079.html
So is your conjecture that Ritalin, as a common street drug, with well known stimulating effects on the non-ADHD user, is merely a case of a placebo effect? They think they should go and dance for 18 hours rather than the effects of the drug?
Sci-fi author and Crysis 2 writer Peter Watts beaten, arrested at US border
Someone has to ask: How do we know we can trust Scroogle?
There's an added bonus to restoring backups on a regular (daily) basis: a one day old instance of the production environment is always available as a playground for training, dev or qa.
It's cool, but probably would have worked better laid out in a stacked bar chart with x being the time axis.
That's very sensible. I can find no fault with your perspective. Still, you're not leaving any room for good, old-fashioned righteous nerd rage. Where's the fun in that? It feels good to start off by interpreting Schmidt's quote as saying that we have no right to privacy at all, for it provides the perfect launching pad for blog rants that stir the passions of peasants to pick up their pitchforks.
Really? Ritalin makes me calmer and helps me sleep a lot better. Does it do that for pretty much everyone?
Yeah, it could actually be a good sign - it says you've got money to burn, so someone obviously believes in you.

That's all very well. But Scoble tries to label it a sign of cluelessness, when in actuality it's a rational ROI decision.
It would seem that you are familiar with the Austrian school, but you are not up to speed on the intellectual property controversy within libertarian circles.

Well, Lugwig von Mises was a utilitarian, but not his student, Murray Rothbard.
At every turn AT&T seems to be actively hostile towards their users. I hope they don't think they are fooling anybody with their "Mark The Spot" bullshit. You want to know what part of your network sucks? It's simple: ALL OF IT. EVERYWHERE.

It's that simple! Just fix EVERYTHING and it might feel more like I'm getting something for my money. Fix the dropped calls, periods where I can't make calls, surprise voicemails, non-playing voicemails, SMS disappearing into the void, vacillating 3G signal strength... and then maybe people wouldn't feel like they are getting raped.
Beware: scroogle.com is not quite safe for work.
You cut a lot from reason 2. The was an important part. I've seen a system where the backups were made. They were verified too. Only after an actual data loss it was discovered that the backup verification was faulty and half of the "verified" and "properly backed up" data was missing.

My point is that you can spend lots of hours trying to backup your data and verify its correctness. But unless you put it back into the actual working environment and check every single bit of it, you cannot be sure it was a proper backup - not with 1GB of information and certainly not with 1TB. And then after you verified that you can verify that you have backups, something will fail and a bunch of people will say "if you didn't check the backups properly, it's your fault". I've seen backup systems fail in amazing ways and will probably never again believe that you can be "sure".
If the windfall profits granted by state-capitalism were vacuumed back into non-existence, perhaps it would be possible for governments, non-profits, and academia to collaboratively conduct pharmaceutical development out in the open.

I've never seen anyone but patent lawyers make a spirited defense of patents for their own sake.
for Ruby there's Hpricot and Nokogiri. Now I must admit not understanding what "parsing as close to the browser as possible" would mean. These parsers would not be for displaying the HTML, they're not rendering engines like those in browsers, but will help you navigate the DOM of a (X)(HT)ML document programatically. Surely I'm missing your meaning.
Ludwig von Mises does not have any opinion on the matter of Galambosianism(Global warming? Obamism? What???) since he died in 1973.
I'm sure mild doses improve productivity for most people, but I would bet their behavior would turn manic at a lower threshold than people in the ADHD spectrum.

Living with ADHD is extremely frustrating. Without medication there were many days where I'd go to work, get side-tracked for a moment, and accomplish absolutely nothing. Operating that way in college is fine, since you can usually find time to cram, but in the real world every day is finals day.

I also tend to engage in lots of negative novelty-seeking behavior: cheating on girlfriends, speeding since I can hardly pay attention to the road at 55, drinking too much, etc. I'm vaguely anhedonic and insatiable, which has led to great success in my career, but I never enjoy it much.
Yes, this! Push backups are inherently risky -- if at all possible, backups should either be pulled by the target, or should be mediated by a third system. Otherwise, you risk an attacker deleting all your backups along with your data.
Oh, they met alright: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Joseph_Galambos
Helped me find a cool video from this Waldemar Horwat guy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq4FpMe6cRs
I'm glad the full transcript is available. You get a lot of insight into the personality of the founder that you wouldn't otherwise.
Stimulants stimulate people with ADHD, too. I'm not sure where people get the idea that they don't. The fact that they stop trying to stimulate themselves means they act calmer, but if you gave someone with ADHD a bunch of Ritalin or a few lines, they certainly aren't falling asleep unless they have a huge tolerance.
>Are website developers also expected to keep the servers secure? If Apache isn't patched and up to date, is that the website admin's fault?

Getting hacked isn't as potentially catastrophic as not having backups. With backups, being hacked can be recovered from and the service provider changed.

>To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job.

A business doesn't expect its premises to burn down, but most have fire insurance in the event that this happens. Even if I don't expect my service provider to fail, there's no way to know that they won't and it makes sense to deal with this risk if the cost of dealing with it is reasonable and the cost of not dealing with it is catastrophic.
Ask the others if you can contact him to document the code.
So the way to resolve this would be to calculate the total users for each browser each year, and scale that entire ring outwards.
I was not aware that Ludwig von Mises have a position on intellectual property or there is a person called Andrew Joeph Galambos.

Something new to learn today I guess. Even so, I am just starting to read Austrian economic literature. So excuse my ignorance.
I don't live in the US so I wouldn't know first hand. But I'd expect H1-Bs to be more qualified than the average US programmer. Many of the big hirers are companies that tend to hire above-average programmers: Microsoft, Intel, Google, investment banks, etc.
Yes, always and every time, I'm sure! ;-)
It thought /.'s quality was in a death spiral pre-digg, and as they tried to compete head-to-head, digg seemed like their death knell. Within a year I think they realized digg was different (crack-addict-speed-news) and if they just focused on what they were good at, they'd do fine.

Since then, I think their quality and focus have both improved. A lot of the idiots (who originate "in soviet russia" and "FP!" type stuff) have moved on to digg, 4chan, reddit, etc. There's fewer posts than a few years ago, but they're more worthwhile. While their SNR is worse, given their number of comments / item, they actually seem to be doing really well compared to other sites.

My account on /. is over a decade old now. I barely visit there, but that's actually amazing - I still visit there over a decade later. I never visit digg or the front page of reddit, and I'm visiting HN less and less.

Part of is it that I'm maturing and managing my time better, but part of it is I'm tired of the bustedness of these sites. I wish 3 things were fixed with these sites:

1. Discussions are maybe 1/2 of the value, but you can't participate really unless you're on and active all the time. I'd guess this is because people only go back to look at the topic again so long as it's on the front page, and the discussions are tied to the topics.

2. For me, most of the rest of the value are in links that aren't really news. They're more like a good old book in the library.. "oh look what I found. this is cool. [link to some page on http://c2.com/cgi/wiki and see one of my ancient edits still alive on there]. They are in fact cool, and it's great people are discovering cool stuff... but it's not news, and I've seen a lot of it already. There's got to be a better way of collecting and presenting this sort of thing.

3. Recommendation system / smart filtering darnit. The decent sites are too limited in topics largely because the only filter / recommender that's working on these sites is super crude: People just congregate on a site and stay around certain areas big portions of them are interested in. That's busted. Even on the best day ever on here, I probably didn't care about 50% of the stuff posted.. and I'd love to hear about and discuss things with other areas that aren't start-ups (HN), free software (/.), or programming (LtU, proggit)

Then of course, there's the Eternal September scaling issue...
JooJoo actually sounds better for that purpose. "What a JooJoo!"
Neat. They should add a 3rd dimension with market size as ring size.
The thing, everyone with an account on HN would put themselves in that category. It's like asking someone if they are a better than average driver. Of course they are. And, if you are a successful startup, sooner or later you will become an "average corporate shop". And so...you need to learn how to manage them.
Whatever happened to patents needing to be "non-obvious" and patent grants being utilized within a certain time period? It seems those two provisions would solve a huge number of frivolous patent lawsuits. Both provisions existed at some point in the last 100 years. What the hell happened and when exactly did it happen? It seems like our patent laws were fairly reasonable not all that long ago.
I believe $25,000 was for his clothing company that he sold at the same time.
...Those prescription stimulants are the difference between a functional happy lifestyle and one which isn't.

As an ADD, I can attest to this. I would even go further: with Strattera, it feels like I have two minds that work simultaneously.

One is free to ponder on the workings of the universe and all things abstract therein.

The other that is like a nanny. It takes care of piddling shit like not getting hit by traffic, remembering why I went into a room, basic politeness, not pissing people off, the whereabouts of my possessions, and remembering if I have to be somewhere at a given time.

Sure, I could take no medication and try focussing more on the basic things I'm supposed to remember instead of being a space cadet, but I could never get myself to. It's just not sexy enough. I prefer to "have two minds."
@dhouston, Thanks for the little info about the motivation behind using this approach.

However, I want to point out that I never said it is a security issue. I just said that it is not a best practice from the security point of view and it could be taken as a starting point for further poking and social engg stuff. I just want to make it clear here.
We've heard one side of the story -- from someone who tells stories for a living. He may have been arrested, and he may have been beaten, but I'd wait to hear more about why.
"Their role in making him look foolish (what I said, incidentally) is indeed quite minor."

Fair enough. But he's not complaining about looking foolish (nor is grandparent as far as I can see). He's complaining about losing data.

In that link he isn't saying "it's your fault no matter what the world throws at you, suck it up." He's saying, "look harder at yourself before you decide somebody else is to blame." Not an issue here; can we agree it is their fault?
you guys read my mind.. i've been needing one of these.
New Google Easter Egg
Go to the website, don't type anything and hit "I'm feeling lucky!", a counter appears. At first it looks like it's a countdown in seconds to new year, but it actually is running faster than seconds, so what could this be?
I recommend that everyone donate a few dollars via PayPal to Peter's legal defense fund:

donate@rifters.com
My guess would be that he politely mouthed off to the guards a bit. Technical people are at risk for harassment because we assume that the process is about something other than the guard not taking a personal dislike to you.
You actually had a much simpler problem back then. For most domains, programming involves dealing with more complicated languages, machines, and APIs.
My guess is that he was being defiant -- yelling at them in a tone similar to his blog post on the matter.http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=932

Beyond yelling, I'd be very surprised if 1 law-abiding author without a criminal history would try to physically confront a group of armed guards.

So is standing up and yelling at an officer enough to justify getting beat up, thrown in jail, & charged with assaulting an officer?
Really? You're still sending packets, so instead of sending roughly 1k of data, you're going to send a packet with roughly 1 byte of information on each keystroke?

What I'd really like to see is the breakdown of the number of packets sent as opposed to the number of bytes. I doubt the difference would be as significant.
Sent after a minor typo. So if anyone can get austin@beatnix.com, you can get a wave invite.
This tends to be the job of the IDE. I am working on a largish .NET codebase, and Visual Studio, combined with a plugin called Resharper is the thing that keeps that sane, giving us context menus that allow us to quickly find usages of a method, or implementations of an interface.

For Java code, Eclipse performs similar functions.
If they're seconds, they equals ~20.2 days. Seems like the 2010 countdown.
dude just say this: "i am a programmer and i write business apps, but i've also played with assembly and know what O-notation is. I also know a lot about computer networks, and i've modded my computer on multiple occasions (I used a soldering iron)."
/.'s comment system is awesome. it is gold.

one interesting thing is the inverse relationship between time and the usability and quality of the comment systems.

we start with /., which has--after lengthy iteration--a reasonable system of karma and crowd sourced filtering, plus a brilliant comment presentation system (open/close nodes, point threshholds with one-liners visible before google made that cool).

then we get digg, reddit, hn, each one providing less and less features. hn is the worst: you can't close discussion branches, there is no summarizing, the points are not capped. actually, these charges are against all the "accumulating-points" set. still, i noticed a real drop in features when i went from reddit to hn, predominantly in the lack of sub-domains or categorizations (/r/scifi, /r/python, etc).

anyway....very interesting from a social point of view.
New Haven Computer Repair Services
Has your company experienced data loss due to hardware malfunctions, viruses, or other unexpected errors? Call us. Our expert computer repair technicians provide backup and recovery solutions to businesses that require urgent assistance on their premises.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1745996+seconds+from+11...

also
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+seconds+until...
Yeah, it's exactly the # of seconds to 1/1/2010 in your local time zone.
I made that exact comment to them at the time, they claimed it wasn't fraud.
My guess was that he raised his voice or otherwise displayed ire. Undoubtedly he did something a wise person in his shoes would not have done. But he probably didn't deserve a beating (although we lack any evidence that that actually happened).
I think a lot of people don't realize that they have drastically reduced rights at or near border crossings. You and your car can be searched by customs at their discretion without warrant or probable cause.

The "in some other universe... I didn't get back in my vehicle when I was told to" quote is telling too. I think someone more familiar with how border crossings work would never refuse to physically comply with a demand from officials.
But new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the
University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that
virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior.
In their study (described in a paper now in press at
Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated
eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit
altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat
and steal.

The conclusion the story draws from the study is really more of a correlation than a causation. It's just as possible that the people who buy virtuously are the type of people who cheat and are stingy rather than buying virtuously causing the "evil" behaviour. The linked study actually doesn't seem to imply causation so Slate is obviously spicing up the story a little.
Refusing to stay in your car when a cop demands that you do so seems like a good way to get thrown to the ground, and once the police start using physical force to restrain you, they get harsh pretty quickly: they gang up, they jam their knees into you, and they slam your face into the pavement. All of this qualifies as taking a beatdown.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out their General Orders demand decisive force once a situation escalates; if you've confronted the wrong kind of guy, doing things that just piss them off (like getting grabby and trying to guide them back into the car) could be dangerous.