skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* shrug * I may not have had enough friends-through-email for them to crop up. My experiences are also with an account that's been around since I started college 5 years ago, with friends who came at nearly the same time, so it could be that they added it later. Good to know for sure that they do do this, though, thanks for the reply.
Do you have high salivary flow, by any chance?
I remember Noah Everett talked about transitioning from AdSense to other options in his Mixergy interview. This from the transcript:

"Andrew: When did you have that big leap, from making just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to actually making substantial money? Was there a month that you actually took that big leap?

Interviewee: Yeah, so when we moved away from Google AdSense to other ad partners, because I just stuck the AdSense code on there just to be generating something. I really didn't know anything about ads, or CPM or CTR, or whatever. I generally knew what it was, but when we started getting into higher quality advertisers, that's when the saw the revenue it creates." [1]

I don't know anything about monetizing by ads but I took this to mean that there are other, more profitable places to sell ads than AdSense, presumably based on some volume of clearly targeted, well characterized traffic.

So Jaques, if you have millions of pageviews per month, could you transition from AdSense to whatever it is Noah Everett is referring to? If not, why not?

[1] http://mixergy.com/twitpic-noah-everett/
As long as their hashing method is sufficiently slow that's not too bad a set of requirement. It at least null and voids the easiest sort of attacks.

Which is not to say it is good.
You'd hope so.

There was a guy by that name working for American Express though:

http://in.linkedin.com/in/gauravsharma14

But the timestamp on the screenshot is recent.
I wish hsbc gave you the numbers it wanted you to enter as images too. Makes it a little more difficult to parse.
Apart from requiring exactly 8 characters, the other constraints will genuinely increase security.

Except, of course, that half the students will end up carrying their password on a piece of paper in their wallet.
Pretty good code, and quite a bit of it. It's hardly a "repository", though, as it's just example code from the site's book. There is, however, a nice link down at the very bottom for machine learning data sets. Gotta save that one...

Taking into account that it's meant to go with the book, it's even decently commented. In quite a few of them, though, it'd be hard to puzzle out reasons for doing things without already knowing the logic.
I would really dispute your first statement. The brower has a very limited API compared to an OS.

Cross platform app development is difficult. But then so is getting a complex web page to run on multiple browsers. To my mind cross platform development is a lot more predictable than cross browser development, but I concede I may be in the minority with that one.

But the initial discussion that everything will be done in the browser seems to have gone out the window, so I can live with some things done with a browser and thick clients to do more complex tasks. In time the browser may start to do some of the things a thick client can do, but I won't hold my breath on that one.
Considering that andreyf posted original link -- yes, it was a sarcasm :-)
Without the ability to do maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope it would have been an epic fail from first light (due to how ineptly it was ground and then not properly tested before launch).

The subsequent repair missions have keep it in operation a lot longer than would have been possible otherwise (replacing failed gyros, failed electronics, orbit boosting), plus the ability to put in new technology instruments has to have been very valuable. And the ability to put in instruments for a limited time, i.e. ones that could be justified for a period between maintenance missions but not for the lifetime of the whole thing.

Robots have their place and so do men.
Read the actual laws. They generally require a licensed PE for any task that (1) requires engineering or technical knowledge to complete correctly, and (2) has an influence on life, health, or property, no matter how trivial. It's like requiring personal trainers to be board-certified cardiologists. Naturally everybody ignores this, and compliance consists of not drawing the attention of the state engineering board.

Electricians follow a handbook rather than derive results from general knowledge, so the PE laws don't apply. As long as the electrical code handbook allows it, they can do it. Possibly at enormous expense, which is why you want a power engineer to plan your factory wiring.
"... And they had a lot more than my email address. They had pictures of me, uploaded by my friends and tagged with my name. They knew who my friends were. They knew what my friends liked. They knew more or less how I would fit into their social network. If they wanted to, they could deduce a lot of information about the person behind the email address. ..."

Thanks greatly for that link. Moglen is a great speaker and his idea of the "Freedom box" (personal servers where you own the logs) goes a long way, to paraphrase Moglen: to put "Zuc" into receivership.
I'll give it a shot, and I'll report on what that did.

The thing that has held me back to date is the number of ad networks that are used to serve up malware, or that redirect the traffic or serve unauthorized pop-ups that's something that I'm fairly sure would never happen with google.

edit: Ok, I'm going to do this a bit more structurally, if you have an advertising network you want benchmarked please add it to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108677

thanks!
You can just "describe" your password for the special-character-impaired:

#(%$^ -> hashleftparenpercentdollarcaret

Probably a might bit harder to crack, too.
I've read the books you listed, and whole heartedly agree with the Graham/Dodd/Buffet crowds with respect to fundamental analysis. However, I don't think this philosophy is mutually exclusive with the Efficient Market Hypothesis. I personally believe in a loose form of EMH, since it actually makes intuitive sense to me. A loose form doesn't mean that investors are SOL in terms of finding good investments; they just need to work much harder (doing all the things you outlined: reading and learning, constantly) to build a high margin of safety and refrain from speculating on high risk securities.

To add to your insightful comments, I'd also recommend subscribing to The Economist to get excellent worldly news about business, finance, and economics.
He makes some decent points about Github's response to their reliability issues, but that's about where it ends. This rant can be summed up as: Github is unreliable and they should work on this, pushing free users to the back burner in favor of their paying clients. Whether or not you agree with that, the rant was a bit unnecessary.
Note: they only need to have the appearance of encryption and security. When they get investigated, they can always blurt out a list of jargon word technologies they use and thus they can prove to a majority if people that they are indeed "secure". And by majority here, I mean mostly judges, attorneys and the media. Yes, this is the same "security theater" that TSA is engaged in.

For example, let's say you are the customer, and someone gains access to AmEx's database of hashed passwords. All passwords are 8 characters long, so after a quick brute and dictionary attack, almost all of the accounts are cracked. Now, you along with all the customers get together and launch and class-action lawsuit. AmEx will only have to blurt out that they use: "RSA", "DSA", "128bit Encryption", "Monitoring" + many other security related jargon and that will be enough to get them of the hook. That's all AmEx needs to do.

They don't have to secure your data or personal information, they only have too fool most people in case of a lawsuit that they tried to secure the information. If they have that covered, they are all set.

Because almost nobody (except for HNers probably) includes security policies as the critical discriminant when shopping for credit cards, AmEx, Visa, MC and Discover others, don't really have to bother implementing any real security.
Alex - while on the surface what you are saying makes sense, as one who has looked at a lot of keylogger data, I can tell you that identifying passwords is fairly trivial, even when the passwords are simple english words like "house" or "dog" (let alone "scrambled words" like "zydkgel" that basically _scream _password. Two things make it straightforward.

* The word is out of context.
* There is usually a time delay on each side of the word.

Also, you usually have them typing in their username/account number near the password, another dead giveaway

So, even requiring that the user make it a straight forward english word provides little (no) defense against keyloggers. On the flip side, when the vendor's hash files (we are presuming at the _very_ least the passwords aren't stored in plaintext, or, the marginally better, "encrypted file") are compromised, having a broad keyspace makes cracking the passwords by brute force more difficult.

If you read the Amex email, they actually require _only letters_ - And, it's not even clear they require capitalization.

I'd love to see how quickly that hash file would fall apart. :-)
Piracy can be "trivally prevented" by not publishing content. The similarity is that once it's out there in any form, you lose control over it. The two are most definitely related.

The whole point of the article was that it's not you giving the information out. Once it's out in the world, via your friends knowing it, you can't choose whether or not it gets entered. Tiny bits of periphery evidence end up being a lot of information about you.

They're sharing something of yours without your consent. That's what the term "piracy" is supposed to mean.
I think the best approach is to read up on asset allocation (other posters have discussed various books and resources), recognize the amount of risk you're willing to take on depending on your timeline, and make a plan for periodic allocations starting now. If you properly allocate your capital amongst different asset classes like stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, and cash equivalents, you'll probably find a sweet spot for good returns balanced with reduced risk. The plethora of ETFs and index funds out there these days will definitely help with making this simple.

Another consideration is to become a direct investor in some sound businesses. Start looking through your networks. Being an angel investor may not be your cup of tea, but maybe you have friends or families that are running great small businesses. If you have good confidence in a business, there's no reason not to invest. There's a personal connection there, and you're likely to get the boost of great returns as well.
The security in Visa, for the most part, doesn't come from protecting you from illegitimate charges happening in the first place, but rather in the fact that there's a chain of authentication so that charges can be reversed at any time, and an expert system trained on your buying habits so that you'll be alerted when you probably do need to make a reversal.
It did seem needlessly harsh. Github responded pretty well to the recent issues though.

Seems like the author just wanted to blame Github for all their problems as opposed to considering that basis of the internet is itself unreliable, factored that in, and handled it gracefully. But maybe I'm being too harsh >_>.
How interesting.

I agree it is unfortunate that Java apps never took off, but that may change, or something like java will replace it. Maybe it was a technology before it's time - or promised more than it delivered, it did have it's flaws. Silverlight and flash are trying to take that place, but no one really wants a proprietary solution.

As for the browser it has it's place, but it's not going to replace thick clients and OS's at least not in the near future.
I really like this implementation. Very clean, effective, and simple. I hope you continue to make progress on it ^_^.
The percentage will definitely be off, it was based on my personal experience growing up in northern England. The same seems to apply here in Ontario, however I would expect it to be different along a cultural border. You can see it here in Ontario with Americans entering, but it's surprising how much speaking a common language has an effect on interactions.

It's very noticeable in Europe at the countries borders due to the schengen area laws. Although when you accidentally arrive in Switzerland and know none of the language, I know I personally feel like a complete ass.
"a real serious business would have created an infrastructure that will provide paying customers a better redundancy for their accounts"

He should apply the same argument he makes against Github to his own business. Putting together a Gitosis or similar setup mirrored to Github would have given him and his paying customers the necessary redundancy to deploy when one of the hosts is down.

EDIT: Figure while I'm here and it's not OT I should give a well-deserved shout-out to Gitosis which has made my life a lot easier the past two years or so:

Gitosis setup is a one-off, very low maintenance install (you add repositories and users by committing config changes and public keys to a git repository -- hardly anything out of your regular workflow). Once set up, mirroring to github or another service is a one-liner in your post-receive hook.
I don't currently have anything hosted at Github, but I use them regularly to check out other people's code and their uptime history is disappointing. I know that they always explain what caused the downtime and I'm glad that they do. Explain what's wrong isn't enough, though. It seems like they have a poorly designed system that can be brought down by almost any piece failing. Their latest outage makes it sound like they don't know how to build a fault tolerant system at all. They have the parts there, like DRBD, but when things go wrong everything breaks anyway. It's like making backups but never testing them so that when you need them it turns out that they can't actually be used to restore anything.

It seems that they have the part that most companies miss, the communication, but that doesn't make up for the lack of reliability.
Move to Australia. Most of our banks offer 12mth term-deposit returns of 6% or greater on deposits >$50,000. For deposits >$1mil the rates are negotiable.
Not when they limit you to 8 characters. :)
I don't think The Onion could have come up with that email... Definitely facepalm material.
shrug

Well, I kinda agree, but if github is really a mission critical piece of your company, then perhaps you should be hosting your own repository.

Or at least mirroring it somewhere? Isn't that half the point of using git over svn?
The reason for the character limitation is a lot more straightforward - on the backend its stored on a very legacy system (in plaintext.. but I didn't tell you that), and to increase the length of the database field would cost 7 figures.
You may want to compare notes with this guy:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9li9n/i_won_a_30_milli...

He won $30M in the lottery and was determined to manage the money wisely in order to live a modest and free life.
If the IM conversations looked like he was joking, would they fire him and also go public with it? I'm not sure.

I've learned from painful experience that my discomfort with lying is not necessarily a good mental model for how other people feel about lying--some have no compunction at all, especially when self-interest is involved, so I'm slow to give the benefit of the doubt.
I seriously doubt others are much better, so unless you're planning on withdrawing from the modern banking system, I wouldn't bother..

I met a guy who did that, and I definitely wouldn't bother with that. He ended up going off-grid too because the power company hated dealing with him and his cash so much. Well, his "eccentricity" might contributed to their opinion of him.
Chatroulette
Tradeoffs for Women in Technology
Rude people in a major international alpha-city? I never.
Did you ever specifically ask someone to "motto shuchou shite kudasai"? I've always wondered if they enjoyed the politeness, or if it was something they'd cast off if they knew you'd appreciate it.
This is really harsh and it sounds like he's looking for a scapegoat on why he is behind on client projects, "i delayed 3 client deploys in the past week due to Github’s downtime".

GitHub is very transparent about their issues and from looking at their blog ( http://github.com/blog/597-a-note-on-the-recent-outages ), "Following three months of near 100% uptime, we’ve just been through three major outages in as many days."

The outages weren't "days long" so those delays in deploying a client's project shouldn't have been significant. If the client expected a deployment during a short window it is irresponsible for the development company to keep the code only in a single location. I cover this in a post about availability on my blog ( http://www.bretpiatt.com/blog/2009/10/03/availability-is-a-f... ).
If you've got a million views a month page for a keywordyou should be able to sell an indvidual ad for big money.

I run maintain a blog for a friend for whom one page ranks highly for a particular keyword gaining her about 100 thousand pv's a month. We sold an ad on that page for about £150 a month. Yes they over pay. But with a million page views you could easily make more.
ruby block syntax is clean, elegant and nest-able which allows creating good looking DSLs.

foo do
bar do
..
end
baz 123
end

now try to do the same with some other language which supports something-kind-of-like-ruby-blocks but with a different syntax. it will not look nearly as good, so in those languages instead of creating DSL people usually implement some kind of config file format instead. or just use XML :)

if you'd have to use 'lambda' to define a block for example, it would make a much worse DSL with lots of extra syntax noise.
I either register domains based on keyword research and bulk searches to see what's still available, or I try to grab expired domains at auction (via drop.com.au). Vast majority of my domains are .com.au - smaller audience obviously, but also less competition when it comes to SEO.

I register through TPP (wholesale account) and host them with CrystalTech. On a base ColdFusion plan ($11.90ish/mo reseller rate) I can host 26 domains and then split out the requests either via ColdFusion or Mod-Rewrite. Some sites are standalone, while a few others use a quick publishing engine I built that takes articles from the database and outputs them with nav, AdSense blocks, etc ready to go.

Given content and a domain pointed to the right nameservers, I can have a multipage site up and running in a few minutes.

I have tried having content written by someone cheaply ($6/300 words) but it's quite obviously MFA, the content isn't massively helpful to those arriving from Google and the sites are rightfully struggling because they're uninspiring.

Another example is a six-page site targeting 2-3 word keyphrases. Content was written by my partner after she had to look into the topic herself and realised there was a bit of a gap in the market. Took her an afternoon to write six pages of content a couple of years back. Took me a couple of hours to put together. Makes about $3-4k/yr from AdSense and I haven't really touched it since I put it together.

If I were to make any recommendations to people hopeful of trying this sort of thing, I'd say:

- have patience, domain age and so on will stop anything from raking in cash immediately
- if you have another side-project with decent pagerank, use that to help out the new project
- don't go for a single keyword as you'll struggle with competition; pick a keyphrase niche
- make sure you pick something that will have advertising in the space and where the clicks will pay (Google the phrase you're considering, and if no ads show, avoid that phrase)
- use Google's keyword research tool to find a niche with some traffic
- try to pick a space where you have some passion/interest and write decent, useful content yourself. If you do use a dodgy paid-writer, take what they've created and try to polish it a bit yourself. I think if you're just looking for a cash-cow, it'll show.

I looked at opening comments through Disqus to try and get some longtail content, but comments are just a waste of time and kill you on maintenance. You want something that will stay relevant and if it needs any maintenance, it's just an hour a month or so to tweak.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn't developers only worry about the issues mentioned in the article on older browsers? (I'm thinking IE6 and earlier).

Introducing a leak via circular references would be considered a bug in most modern JS engines, right?

A related question: Can someone recommend a good plugin/extension for monitoring the size of a page's javascript memory usage over time?
Codingthewheel is back with Poker SO clone
Richard Stallman speaking in Bern and protesting against Berne Convention
Yeah, I agree with the loose interpretation of EMH. The market has to be somewhat efficient in order to eventually realize a security's true value.

Personally, my favorite stuff is where there are clear inefficiencies.

Investing in orphan spinoffs is an example-- a company is spun off from its parent but is too small to be included in the S&P 500 or some key index, where its parent exists. Since it wont be part of the major indices, fund managers are forced to sell, creating the kind of inefficiency that an investor can profit from.
What are your tax rates on interest?
They're not for any individual keyword, they're for an enormous range.

For one single keyword it would be worth selling ads direct, selling inventory for a large range of keywords direct is a major headache. That sounds like real work ;)
I tend to agree, though it's clearly not as bad as this article makes it out to be.

(I should precise that I'm French and have been living in the US for 5+ years) I think it's a different culture in customer service, and every time I go back I'm now expecting to have at least one weird-to-disastrous customer service experience. For Christmas, it was a call-center guy at Orange who was super condescending, refused to let me talk to his supervisor and ended up hanging up on me. (NB: I wasn't rude myself) I can absolutely not imagine that happening in the US.
Although his example for cancelling github is a bit silly (Not deploying due to its downtime even though he could have set up a local repository).

His gripe with a paid service being down and unreliable and his action of cancelling is perfectly reasonable if he runs a business and wants a set uptime.
"How to...if nobody is following you on twitter" reply from the target audience
Call Vanguard :) Or find a fee only financial planner. Do not use commission based financail planners.
This is a standard guy with no real experience and no programming experience getting to $72k/yr after investing some time. Not quite living the dream, but it's not awful either given that he may not have had some outrageous education or experience and is now getting passive income that he can gradually build on.

I think anyone here with some general startup knowledge/ability (e.g., can buy a domain, set up hosting, write HTML, write content, etc) could probably build up a passive $50/day source to give them a bit of a buffer to create bigger projects. Or they should at least be trying it to see if they can pull it off.
How statistically significant correlations are not always significant
I've been very happy with repositionhosting.com uptime and support.