skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very common to see these criticisms brought against Perl: it's line noise, a write-only language, only useful for scripting, dead and so on.

Thankfully, they are all unfounded.

While scripting has been the use case in the '90s, Perl is nowadays used for a variety of tasks, including complex desktop applications such as the Perl IDE (screenshots), web application frameworks (Catalyst), bioinformatics (extensively), content management systems (e.g. WebGUI), hierarchical wikis (MojoMojo) etc. and powers very large websites (IMDB, Magazines.com, BBC, Amazon.com, LiveJournal, Ticketmaster, Craigslist etc.).

More at
http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Perl_vs_Java#Common_criticisms
Cross-domain HTTP search timing attack
That argument's hardly better than the "he helps cats therefore he's innocent" quip at the bottom of the link. Quit thinking of there being two sides: there's no "other story", there's just "insufficient information". All we know is that he got pepper sprayed and charged, and that he needs money. Donate to his defense fund and leave the speculation to science fiction writers.

(I'll let someone else comment on "if you don't obey, you're asking for it".)
FYI: Updates from Watts' blog are online at http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=935.
There are a lot of simple flash shims out there -- I'm using one for my app, with everything else written in javascript. For me, switching to websocket would be more or less ceremonial rather than practical.
Nickb
Ritalin, like most stimulants, boosts the dopamine levels in the synaptic cleft. This is the same basic mechanism of caffeine, nicotine, methylphenidate (Ritalin), amphetamine (Aderol), cocaine and methamphetamine. It shouldn't be making you sleep better. ;-)
You actually like Strattera? I went on that stuff for a month and it was the worst feeling ever. It felt like a gun pressed up against the back of my brain all the time, I pretty much wanted to die.

Ritalin and traditional stimulates on the other hand are always great but I build up a tolerance quickly. (Currently I just use various caffeine sources to concentrate.)
Heh, she's marketing marketing. I think my brain exploded. A lot of other threads are taking issue with her style and some of her points but you're really missing the point. She's trying to make marketing sound like something you want to do and dispel impressions of it that I know that I (and some of my friends however small a sample that may be) had at one point. It's not about logical implications, it's about creating an amenable atmosphere. Can you see yourself doing marketing? If not, then this might be an article you should read.

On the other hand, I would hope that any serious entrepreneurs on HN would already have grasped the point that marketing is good for business, so it might be a bit redundant.
That's cool for millionaires and Time's most influential people. But some of us are looking for jobs. And we're pretty paranoid.
Seems like there's room for a new startup for easy backups for shared webhosts.
I really enjoy how every single mental disorder has to do with not enough or too much dopamine.
You mean trading currency for currency doesn't go anywhere? Umm, I guess so. What's your point? The guy wasn't in the currency exchange business.
Experience porting a Firefox add-on to a Chrome extension
so basically it's Smurfs The Movie?
You're absolutely right. However, that doesn't mean that taking any opportunity to push back towards more privacy is in any way misplaced effort. I don't expect it will magically bring us to an utopian world where privacy is assured, but it's the only way to slow the progress towards less and less privacy.
Awesome, some real information, rather than pointless and obvious speculation as to what happened. He links a news story:

http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20091211/NEWS01/912110...
Nearly every story told today has been told a thousand times before it all the way into prerecorded history. Like startups, a movie is IMHO about execution - it is very much not about what the story is, but rather who tells it, and how it is told.

I'm personally excited - there were a lot of detractors and doubters, and I was one of them. I'm glad Cameron has defeated all the nay-sayers and made something grand; I for one will be sure to see it.
Lots of people make the mistake of assuming that James Cameron's movies will be undone by their threadbare plots. Then they see the movies.

Cameron is among the best action filmmakers ever. The thing about action is not so much that it has no plot -- one heck of a lot happens in a James Cameron movie, and it tends to be quite logical and internally consistent too, because the guy keeps obsessive track of every damn thing. The problem is that a good action movie's plot can't be described in words. You sort of have to be there. The individual events -- guns jamming, doors sliding, lights flashing -- just don't add up to much by themselves. It's like trying to describe the Taj Mahal by talking about one brick at a time.

James Cameron can do a lot with three apparent cliches. Provided he also has several hundred million dollars. ;)
And I've had the misfortune of meeting asshole border guards on both sides, many years apart. Do I win a door prize?
Sadly, I think we won't get too much more info for a while, since Watts is not in a place to say much right now, and I don't think that the border guards will have much to say...
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The bottom-line problem seems to be that law-abiding people don't have much experience with being treated like criminals.

In a high-pressure situation they sometimes fall back on their quaint expectations of rights and basic human respect. I would wager that someone who had spent serious time in prison would do much better in these situations.

The guy probably had a long day. I bet he just wanted nothing more than to get home and go to sleep. He obviously didn't understand what all the fuss was about, and he ended up stepping on someone's hair trigger. It seems terribly unlikely he did something that you or I would consider physically threatening. After being pepper-sprayed and man-handled, and likely not in the soundest state of mind, maybe he even flailed a bit -- guaranteeing an assault charge (and possible conviction).

Perhaps that's how it went down. It'll probably turn out that the border guards "followed procedure." But that's exactly the problem that makes the story frightening to us:

The path from "long day + non-violent temporary failure of judgement" to "being physically assaulted and facing a life-altering felony charge" seems terribly short.
> project the same surliness back at them and you're just asking for trouble.

That's commonsense, but its truth still pisses me off. There is zero reason border guards deserve deference, and projecting surliness to people behaving surly is my natural right.
Money is just a generally accepted means of transferring wealth from one place to another. Currency is a subset of all money. Lots of things can take the place of money, as long as they have the right attributes (mutual trust, fungible, not easily debased or forged, transportable, etc.)

Money is not a "zero-sum game", and in particular, wealth has almost no relationship with money. Money is just the "working capital" in various ongoing wealth exchanges, the water in the pipes, as it were, if the economy was viewed as an interlocking system of flows. And currency, the printed stuff from a central bank, is not the total sum of this money.
I have never understood the legal doctrine by which inalienable rights suddenly become quite, well, alienable at the border. If a right is truly universal, then it should hold at the border just as well as it does anywhere else. This is one of many places where I disagree with the US Supreme Court on principle, and where I suspect that they let politics cloud their expertise.
I thought it was sarcasm. He is showing people how their only real obstacle is complacency?
Books by Brian Tracy
The hippies live in Berkeley.
If you have a billion pretty trinkets, and by pretty I mean that other people desire to have them at some positive price, you only need one single dollar in the system - or other agreed form of money - and you can sell every single one of those trinkets, albeit slowly. And because what you really need is money, rather than currency, you do not require a central bank.

All you need is trust in the value of whatever you choose as money - it could be debt backed by a legal system - and that the money has sufficient money-like attributes. If your trinkets are small and durable enough, they might even do as money directly.
> Especially if this is difficult for you, I suggest that you take some time to study meat computers.

I do, and I have. I just wanted to say that it's one of the most challenging things I've ever worked on in my life. I still occasionally slip up, but in the main I've killed the impulse to argue combatively.
I appreciate the links; I had to learn too, and I largely have done so. Just wanted to say that it is, in fact, difficult.
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I think (maybe) that Google advertises it to IE users on the front page at times (all the time for IE6 users?).
I'm having a little trouble understanding your position. Do you feel that any individual or group that advocates a limit, even a high limit, on the number of immigrants or guest workers who can come to the united states each year is "anti-foreign worker?"

Keep in mind that even without the H1B visa, the USA already takes in about 1.2 million immigrants legally each year. I also believe the principle objection to the H1B is that it specifically targets a few professions, causing a greater disruption to engineers/scientists (and potentially discouraging young Americans from entering these fields). Many people who are opposed to the H1B visa are not opposed to more general immigration.

Anyway, thanks for responding. As you can probably tell, I take a dim view of the H1B visa. I do think it's important to have a healthy (but limited) infusion of talent from other countries, but I think that we need to ensure that it is not overly concentrated in a single field, and I do believe that it is reasonable to enforce absolute limits to the number of people who can come to the US each year. I believe that this position is more pro than anti-foreign worker.
If you look at the js source, it's until Date(2010,0,1)

Guess someone at Big G is really looking forward to 2010
might be - but even if so, i don't see a point in beeing sarcastic as it does not provide anything. i don't know anything more than i did before. /2c
Thanks, that helped a lot. I had been trying to repeat with "."; hadn't noticed how many different kinds of repeats there are.
If, on the other hand, you set up a kiosk labeled "NYC Directions" on a corner, I'd assume you knew more about getting around the city than your average bear.
Fascinating how history can limit a UI designers choices...
What are some other James Cameron movies that you think would fit your description above?
I would have thought that's self-evident. Why go to the hassle of hiring H1-Bs if you could hire good people locally?

FWIW, I have a H1-B, but I never actually made the jump to move to the US. It's in my passport sitting in my drawer right here.
The author ignores the main reason patents exist by pulling in emotional things. Sure, in a magical happy world it would be great to offer children in Africa free AIDS medicine, but the fact of the matter is that millions of dollars go into getting a drug like that to market. It takes millions of dollars of research, millions of dollars to go through clinical trials, millions of dollars to go through FDA approvals, etc. And ultimately most drugs are very simple chemical compounds that could be easily synthesized in retrospect with the most basic of equipment.

While it's certainly bad for companies to exploit the patent system and try to extort profit out of sick and dying people, that does not justify throwing out the protection altogether.

If we threw out the patent system, none of the drug companies would spend the millions of dollars required to create things like a cure for AIDS as they would not make that money back because the next guy would just do some simple chromatography and have the same chemical compound synthesized for a fraction of the cost. What company is going to go tens of millions of dollars in debt with no hope of making that money back? When the incentive to do research is gone, we have no AIDS cure at all and in my opinion a world with no AIDS cure is worse than a world with an AIDS cure that's a bit expensive.

There are many things that are broken with the patent system for sure, but throwing it out completely would cause many things to fall apart and cause catastrophic damage.
Aliens, that's a classic.
Peninsula/South Bay Hacker Dinner Saturday (Dec 12) ?
Anyone up for a hacker dinner? Any thoughts on where?
His last activity was 158 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb

Wow. My goodness. Is his death confirmed? It wasn't clear from the thread. I'm unsure of who else (from HN) knew him. Can anyone clarify?
He lost his $200k/month golden goose due to falling on google's rankings.

He traded his $2million in cash for some status symbols.
Or a cell phone that's just a plain phone, with nice buttons.

They do exist, just go to a cellphone shop sometime.

The problem is not that they don't exist but that everybody prefers to buy the touchscreen phones and then complain how slow and unpractical they are...
There is zero reason border guards deserve deference

No? Such universal, stratospheric levels of assholedom don't arise organically--border guards behave the way they do because they are trained to. Probably because the alternative, cheerfully waving everyone through, is unacceptable from a national security standpoint.

I know you can justify pretty much anything these days by waving the security flag, but I think in this instance it's fair. They deserve deference because somebody has got to secure our borders in this day and age, and like it or not, this is probably the best way to go about doing it. I'm willing to live with my feelings getting hurt if it means people aren't able to drive bombs over the border.
If you were only on the Strattera for a month and felt like you "wanted to die," you were probably started at too high a dose. They come in doses as low as 5mg.
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James Cameron's New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever
158 days ago was July 7, 2009. Google news doesn't show a news story about a hang gliding death of anyone named "nicholas" this year, though that's far from conclusive.
The real news here isn't so much "why Ritalin works," but that we now have a coherent theory of the pathophysiology of ADHD (fewer dopamine receptors in the brain). That the theory explains why Ritalin (and other meds) work is just a very nice consequence of the theory.
Judging from the extremely low number of deaths per year from hang gliding (for example, 2 reported in 2003), my money is on this just being a troll. I hope that's the case anyway.

Source :
http://www.ushpa.aero/safety/HG2003AccidentSummary.pdf
> hn is the worst

That is fine with me. I'm here because you guys/gals, not the software. It is the community rather than the features of the sites that gets me to f5 every 15min. I don't want critical mass here.

There is something to this, cause I did Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit.... All have gone from my daily reading.

Slashdot (staying on topic) more because I don't find anything fresh there because of the story moderation, the comments are where the quality is, but I don't have that attention span and the news seems a day late.

There is something to this though - an inverse relationship between quality and popularity.
well played sir. perspective.
Right... but then you have stories like this:

http://www.newschief.com/article/20091116/NEWS/911169996?Tit...

To be clear, I'm not making any insinuations and I really hope this is a troll
They appear to dislike Google, shouldn't that be good enough for anyone?
his last name is barnes
+1 duplicity. It can backup to IMAP, meaning it can backup to gmail. Why pay $10+/mo to an online backup provider when Google provides 7GB of free storage (per captcha) inside some awesome tier1 datacenter?
Could this be him? http://twitter.com/n_a_b
Well, obviously some people do die, but I bet that it's a lot more likely that a troll would say someone died in a hang gliding accident than it would be for someone to actually do so. The perceived risk is probably much higher and it makes the story more interesting. If you want to believably report someone's death, say they were in a traffic fatality.
Is there some reason other than the name? There's probably tens of thousands of people who are named Nick B.
I guess this is good for people who are worried about what Google collects about them.

Personally I feel there's a bit of a moral issue in doing something that would cause the system to break down if everyone did it. Also the page is uglier and takes twice as long to load as google.com (longer perceptually, I'm just going by what Safari's web inspector says).
There's a lot of hyperactive brain activity in an ADHD person, caused by a need for mental stimulation. And medication probably slows that activity down by satisfying that, allowing him/her to sleep.
No. nickb's last name is Bobic.
nothing I could find, seems either bogus or unreported to me.
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Here's a 113 day old Where's nickb thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775507

Actually, there's several post like the above one. Here's all (recent) posts with nickb in title: http://searchyc.com/submissions/nickb

Nickb tells his background history here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99966
I will pass along but not comment on the following:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152428
Actually, it was JWZ who said that.
Caffeine is a drug.
Then why work for "them"? Are there really that many IT workers who work for large organization who pay by the hour and screw them over? Is this some kind of IT assembly line? At every company I've worked at that had an IT department, we were an extremely small percentage of the employees or management didn't want to dedicate resources to something that they didn't perceive was core to the business or the company's core competency (either because the IT group was really good and there was no need for more people, or because management didn't see the value in more technical bandwidth).

The last thing I want is to be considered a scab because I know what I'm worth and am willing to work for someone who recognizes that but doesn't recognize collective bargaining. It's not like technology positions require a huge capital investment, in things like factories or real estate (thus reducing worker mobility), and the workers are largely interchangeable cogs (we're not, no matter what management would wish). If a company wants to replace me with someone cheaper in order to save money, well, I'm not sure that's a place I want to work anyway. And if they can find someone just as good as me who is willing to takes less, well, that's just good business (meaning: I can't really fault them for doing the same thing I would) -- maybe then I'd need to sell myself better.

From the OP: In some cases it works out that way. But in many cases, years of 60-hour weeks and taking classes on your own dime to keep up with technology leave you in the unemployment line, after being laid off with no notice.

I don't know many technology workers who are laid off without notice for reasons other than the company being in dire straights anyway. And this is often bad management (yuck!), or an unsustainable business (equally bad).

Companies I've worked that had "continuing education" options were usually along the lines of certifications, which were mainly about being able to charge more for my work to clients because I was certified -- after all, they're running a business here, not putting people through school. And even if you are paying for taking classes out of your own pocket, they only serves to INCREASE your marketability if you get laid off, so taking classes or learning on your own is in your own best interest anyway. Paying for it yourself means you aren't beholden to the company either.

Admittedly, the OP is talking about contract work as the form of hourly work. How many people get hired for contract work that collective bargaining at a single company would make a difference? Contractors are usually in for temporary (time limited) work anyway, which is not "being fired" unexpectedly.
quaint expectations of rights and basic human respect. I would wager that someone who had spent serious time in prison would do much better in these situations.

This is America. We shouldn't be expected to act like guilty slaves when interacting with law enforcement. Your attitude isn't constructive at all.
Goodness no. How will we ever find out who wins now?
My father is a professor and doctor of medicine at one of the most esteemed medical schools in the country. He is 100% sure that without patents we simply wouldn't have most of the drugs we have today. They are far too expensive to develop and then have your competitors copy. The government funding for these projects is pitifully small and slow (I can say that from an academic non-medicine perspective as well). Non-profits are pretty much useless as well since they have nowhere near the funds.
The plot description still sounds like "Dances with Smurfs," as South Park put it, but Ebert's endorsement sounds like it could be a really, really well-executed "Dances with Smurfs."
I'm sure someone here was slightly motivated by that. Not me though, since everything he said does not apply to me.
No. nickb's last name is Paulson.
Thanks for s3sync!
What kind of computer did Larry Page and Sergey Brin intially develop google on?
Just occured to me that this might be valuable one day... :)

Also watching Hackers.
It was random assignment/controlled:

> In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to select items they wanted to buy in one of two online stores. One store sold predominantly green products, the other mostly conventional items.

That said, interesting point by you. I'd guess the causation can run both ways - doing superficial good gives you the moral license they were talking about, but also maybe bad people want to compensate and wash their sins away with some public good behavior.
Not him.

I've known Nick for a decade. He's gone silent before, but not like this. I can't get a hold of him at all. Neither can anyone else I know who knows him.
They have a "get satisfaction" account (if I've remembered the correct service name), post onto that, they use that for bugs and all that whoohar.
Oh, I like that. Pepper spray in the eyes + flailing in pain = assault on a federal officer.
The whole bashing MINIX theme is vaguely reminiscent of the ancient Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds flame war. Of course, Linus himself recently admitted that the monolithic kernel has grown too large and hard to manage. Not trying to restart that old flame war or anything.
The name and his description. I knew it was unlikely.

Edit: I was also searching using the string "Nick Barnes" however there's some dispute about whether this is his name.
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