mryall

There's a decay algorithm which scores posts based on their points and how long ago they were posted.

There are some good articles about the algorithm floating around if you Google for it.

User-provided data in any transport format (e.g. HTML) needs to be properly escaped so it can't use special characters to be processed as code or metadata rather than just plain data. Bugs in escaping cause pretty much every kind of injection attack, from SQL to XSS. The fundamental problem is not escaping data correctly for the context in which it is used.

If you want to see specific examples, search for how to avoid XSS attacks. Any decent guide will focus on escaping, not sanitisation.

It's amazing how much we still have to learn about our own solar system, and staggering how long the research takes.

> Cassini is scheduled for three more encounters with Enceladus, including one final plunge through a plume, before it is sent to a fiery death in Saturn’s atmosphere to avoid crashing into and contaminating the ringed planet's icy moons.

Great that they're thinking in advance about this stuff. Would be a shame to contaminate our best chance of discovering microbial ET with spores from earth.

The difference between this experiment and advertising or A/B testing is _intent_. With A/B testing and advertising, the publisher is attempting to sway user behaviour toward purchasing or some other goal which is usually obvious to the user.

With this experiment, Facebook are modifying the news feeds of their users specifically to affect their emotions, and then measure impact of that emotional change. The intention is to modify the feelings of users on the system, some negatively, some positively.

Intentional messing with human moods like this purely for experimentation is the reason why ethics committees exist at research organisations, and why informed consent is required from participants in experiments.

Informed consent in this case could have involved popping up a dialog to all users who were to be involved in the experiment, informing them that the presentation of information in Facebook would be changed in a way that might affect their emotions or mood. That is what you would expect of doctors and researchers when dealing with substances or activities that could adversely affects people's moods. We should expect no less from pervasive social networks like Facebook.

I've had some success with removing specific fonts entirely:

  font-family: sans-serif;

You get Helvetica on Mac, Arial on Windows and various other default fonts on other platforms. Users can also pick their own font via browser settings.

For pixel-perfect alignment, you need to deal with some minor size differences between the fonts, but pixel-perfect design is not really achievable in many designs anyway.

Rather than designing to better fit the pixels you can see like on Windows, I'm pretty sure the Mac OS X hinting was designed to get progressively better as screen densities increased. Like their reliance on hardware acceleration in the window manager, it was a forward-looking technical decision built in to the OS.

Unfortunately, we got stuck in a 96 DPI rut throughout the 2000s and are only just coming out of it with high-DPI "Retina" displays. Now the Mac hinting decision makes more sense, and the ClearType technology looks bizarre, whereas for all the last decade it was the opposite.

Actually the equivalent of the above Perl 6 code would be:

    f(g(h(a)))

It can get kind of gnarly when any of the values are non-trivial.

This is why upvotes exist.

> At current rates, we are currently experiencing a mass extinction event worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Interesting assertion. Got a citation for that?

I hate the implication in this comment and in the linked article that the spec is somehow immutable. The ECMAScript spec here is fundamentally flawed with regard to character encoding and needs to be fixed.

UCS-2 is not a valid Unicode encoding any more, because there are several sets of characters encoded outside the BMP. The spec should be updated to require UTF-16 support in all implementations.

If a modern programming language like JavaScript doesn't provide a way to represent characters outside the BMP in its character data type, that needs to be fixed too. Indexing and counting characters in a JavaScript string need to reflect the human and Unicode notion of characters, not the arbitrary 2-byte blocks that UCS-2 happens to use.

The language authors should be ashamed of this situation - having a modern language without proper Unicode support is simply awful.

Failure modes are defined by the two-phase commit protocol, the standard way of managing distributed database changes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol

You can go into the Keyboard system preferences and set a keyboard shortcut for "Sleep".

More interesting than a bunch of chatter on Google Plus is this article on Forbes, "Could Steve Jobs actually win his thermonuclear war?":

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/30/could-steve-jobs-actu...

I don't think this will be the last of Apple's actions against Android. When Steve said they'd "patented the hell out of" the iPhone, I got the sense he really wasn't joking.

This is a post I wrote a while ago, but forgot to submit to HN. I think it is still a very interesting chart, even though it's now a couple of months after the acquisition.

My tablet (iPad 3G first gen) makes for a great portable street directory when I'm in the car with my girlfriend. It's definitely not its primary purpose for me, but I find it much easier to use than a dead tree copy. Aside from having a really natural easy way to move around the map, you always know where you are. :)

Maybe Allan should skip version 2 completely and just release the new one as TextMate 3.

Ah, clever! Thanks for the link.

People have managed to achieve much greater ranges (like more than a kilometre) with 802.11 technology using "cantennas" -- directional antennas like what you're talking about.

While it's theoretically possible, I'm not sure whether this is practical for general use on a LAN. You'd probably have to have a wireless antenna poking out of your laptop, which you'd point at the access point. Seems a little bit inconvenient.

Likewise. Perl's DBD::CSV module was my greatest discovery - SQL queries across flat files! No joins though. :)

I'd say the choice of Chameleon was driven by them wanting it to look "modern" or iOS-like. A native Git/Github client like this doesn't make sense on a device where you can't develop code (except in the web browser with Cloud9 or something).

In respect to the Windows question, I wouldn't be surprised to see them ship one in a few months, once they iron out the bugs and determine exactly which set of features a native client needs to provide.

Trademark is the normal legal foundation for protecting a name. But trademarks are limited by industry and geography, so attempting to enforce them on a single global namespace like Twitter or DNS is always going to end up with conflicts.

However, this is probably the best way to protect a name you use on Twitter: register a trademark and let them know that you're using your registered name as a Twitter handle and want it maintained for your business/organisation.

This earlier article has some discussion of Groupon's moat, or lack thereof.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616412

Even though JS doesn't have language constructs for public/private, there are a number of different ways to write modules with hidden members by use of closures.

Crockford explains with some examples here:

http://javascript.crockford.com/private.html

Agreed. I find Lucida Grande a good programming font too.

Would love to see a list of top 10 proportional programming fonts.

I'm glad they backed out the changes to attr(). Backward compatibility is critical for any popular library, often more important than having completely "correct" behaviour.

Without any kind of type-safety or compilation in JavaScript, it's even more important for jQuery to preserve compatibility than libraries in other languages. You probably wouldn't discover some obscure breakages until the software using it is in production.

The music businesses wouldn't be worth anywhere near that much. And it would help Google's goal of making the world's information universally accessible and useful.

Yeah, I'd like this as well. When a long top-voted thread goes off on an obscure tangent, it's often hard to find the start of the next major thread because the indent levels are so small.

Nice. I might have guess it if you'd included the chorus: kkkohdkkkohdkkkohdkkkohd. :)

> The chapter on Google in China is also phenomenal.

Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450030