skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a unique generated password for every instance. Then I store these passwords in yaml files on an encrypted partition on my harddrive that is unlocked by a keyfile on a usb stick. I wrote a little script that searches these yaml files and automatically copies the password found for a given key (usually a site nickname, like "hn") to the clipboard, so I can just paste it in. This is both convenient and allows me to use a unique, strong password for every site and service I use.
Investment in iPad/iPhone App Startups Up 220%
It's not really that bad. I'm baffled how he could spend 2 years with Django and not understand how to do the things he's complaining about (not to mention python).

I think it was just a bitching session.
Definitely agree about the fact that seamless integration between devices/having a centralized global profile will be the next big thing. It's something that can increase the usefulness of other products and that if well executed have a huge market imo.
Every time i think about this i always remember this old Intel video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrzeiUvDZog
Rejecta Mathematica: online journal for rejecters papers
I'm a touring musician and it's not that bad. I like waking up and not knowing where I am. I find that when I get comfortable I become stagnant.
Thanks! I think we fixed it, but if we haven't -- privately message me? :P
It reminds me of that "news consumption over time" strata chart that made the rounds last year, whose data source was its author's own perception of history.
Perhaps I misunderstand your assertion, but I do want to clarify that django does provide views for user management in django.contrib.auth.views. It includes login, logout, and password reset/change views. Granted, it doesn't include templates, but those are pretty straightforward and site-specific anyway.
Ask HN Poll: Do you bill for meetings?
This goes out to all the freelancers out there: When you meet with a client, or talk on the phone, do you bill for that time?

* I bill, and I let my client know I'm billing for the meeting / call

* I bill, and I don't let my client know

* I bill, I don't let them know, but I'm pretty sure they know I'm billing

* I don't bill

* I don't bill, but I wish I would

* None of the above
10 years ago this would have been cute. Now it's rather sad.
It's telling that the kind of job Lycos is offering is an Associate to Senior Level Software Engineer in Web Publishing, and that trying to apply for this position (their "corporate culture" swayed me...) takes me to a Recruit Wizard.
It's nice that you think the HN readership is a bunch of lemmings off whom I intend to directly profit, but the CME is a futures exchange and has almost nothing to do with personal investing.
Oh, that's good to hear. I had a feeling my experience was atypical.
Lay people seem to think peer review is some sort of objective process... but back in the day when I was involved with these kinds of papers, it was very political.

First thing peer review did was screen papers for "political correctness". Thus if you had an innovative theory and a major proponent of a different, possibly established but quite wrong, theory was on the peer panel, your paper wouldn't get published..... but you might get an "opportunity" to do some further research in partnership with that "peer" that "attempts to reconcile the two theories"... his name needing to be on the resulting paper, "of course" and "first".

Fortunately we worked on a team with a publicly well known heavy hitter and he was able to swing enough weight to keep our papers from being squashed.
Las Vegas, on the other hand, does quite nicely as a city full of nightclub owners.

There's definitely a future for Dubai as the Las Vegas of the middle east, if that's where they choose to go.
But the getacoder poster only specified that it had to be done in polynomial time, and didn't clarify whether that had to be total CPU time (i.e., "work") or wall clock time.

Given that underspecification, it's perfectly justifiable to use an exponential amount of resources to achieve the goal.
Nitrode: A lightweight, super fast HTTP server built on Node.JS
But if you only have a finite amount of hardware available (which is probably the case), each node's data set grows exponentially with input size.

If your node population increases exponentially with input size, you're still running into the speed-of-light delay problem mentioned above (cube root of exponential is still exponential). If your solution is polynomial time with polynomially many nodes, your space cost is also polynomial.
Post a simple 4 question survey to be returned by email:

1) Are you currently in active development of a software product or service? If so, please provide a link to a dev site, screenshots, or informational material.

2) What do you hope to acquire from attending the conference that will help you in your new venture?

3) What current financial limitations prevent you from being a paying attendee?

4) If chosen, would you be willing to pay a $200 deposit that you will get back upon your arrival?

----------------------

Question 1 will help you find the people that will be more likely to benefit from it, since they are past the napkin sketch and dream stage and have actually taken the initiative to start something - and will be more likely to take the initiative to apply what they've learned to their own venture. Not to say the dreamers won't get there - maybe they'll be ready for next year's conference.

Question 2 will make sure the potential attendee is educated on the talks being given/networking opportunity and has thought through how they could benefit their venture.

Question 3 helps you rule out a potential paying attendee by making them explain why it is they can't afford the conference on their own dime.

Question 4 will make sure the candidate has some skin in the game so they are less likely to be a no-show and waste a valuable ticket that another candidate would have loved to have.

This just came off the top of the head, but could obviously be refined to achieve what you're trying to accomplish.

Thanks for providing this opportunity!
What kind of jobs are you looking at? Is there any businesses you can find where the Polish owners speak English and are looking to expand their business overseas to English-speaking audiences and the fact that you're an English speaking native would be perfect for customer support, e-mail and so on?
What are some use cases for worker threads? Initially I thought there must be loads, but when I considered that XHR is asynchronous anyway, and that Worker threads don't have access to the DOM...

I guess it would be good if you wanted to use your visitors CPU in the background for password cracking or for the various distributed network stuff like SETI.

But what practical benefits do web workers provide for normal web development?
None of the above.

Sometimes I do, if the call is more than 15 minutes or ends up with any sort of actionable items. If it's just a few minute status call, I don't bill for it.

Gentle plug: http://indieconf.com - a conference for web freelancers - will cover these sorts of topics in greater detail. :)
"Space Cadets" by Charles Stross
Ask HN: How much of cellular network traffic is indeed wireless?
In the ongoing discussion about the Verizon and Google agreement, I am wondering how many network hops on avg(if that would be the right term on cellular network) does it take until network traffic is handled on the wireless provider physical fiber network. and how does the agreement deal with this issue?
Exactly, it saves a lot of time when you want a cookie-cutter site using lots of 3rd party apps. Not knocking that - there are lots of cases where that's exactly what you need. But this is what reminds me more of a CMS like Drupal than a framework - blocks of content managed by a single admin and authentication system.

When I want to do something more original and specific where I don't need all those apps, Django just gets in the way - and that's when I turn to a more lightweight and flexible framework.

Use the best tool for the job. Sometimes Django is that tool. The problem I have is with companies and individuals who think it's the only tool.
"British stick with British, Americans with Americans, Indians with Indians etc."

That's not so much racism as pretty much the way it is with expat communities all over the world. Dubai, though, has far worse racial problems than that.
I'd suggest something like the way that http://bit.ly handles their urls. Auto-generate a short string or let users (maybe after a registration or something) enter their own.

It'd be nice to be able to say "Keep track of my progress at http://mobileply.com/matt or something similar. Heck, I could see myself even paying a couple bucks for a nice url like that.
There’s a very simple reason: air conditioning. One skyscraper with a thousand residents is going to be more energy-efficient than a thousand single-family homes or even a hundred smaller apartment buildings. It also allows the developer to offer tenants some other amenities, such as restaurants or shopping, just an elevator ride away, and others within a few blocks or a short drive.

Most Americans aspire to live in a detached single-family house with a yard, if they don’t live that way already, but I don’t think this is a worldwide preference.
Speaking for myself, architecture that doesn't look like glass shoeboxes is anything but kitschy. Although I'll give you the cargo-cult point.

I just saw some new construction going up in Budapest along the river that is based heavily on the 19th-century architecture of much of the rest of the city. It still has a couple of airy glass walls, but some of the building was good solid brick with the staggered stone window facing that's so typical of most of Pest. I thought it was fantastic. (My wife, the Hungarian, was unimpressed; indeed, I'm not even sure she understand what point I was trying to make about it. Ah well.)
The only genuinely serious DNS incident in this article is Kaminsky's query-ID bug. A better article might have noted all the times in the past when the DNS has been similarly exposed. Like the time Eugene Kashpureff tried to create an entire alternate domain name registrar using cache poisoning attacks. I note, smugly, that the Internet didn't fall around our ears then, nor has it recently.

DNSSEC will cause more problems than it claims to solve.
Same thing for me. I just got my CS master degree and now I want to discover the world with only my bike, my laptop and my reflex camera, a few month to a couple of years at the same place...

But I'm worried by the first move. Where I live I got a lot of job opportunity but I don't know if I will be able to find a job in another country quickly enough and it doesn't work very well remotely.
I have to second that one. Zoning was well-intentioned and everybody likes a leafy green suburb, but it's killing us.
This would be the same thing as Rails... yeah, it'll load everything in app/models by itself, but anything else is just a require away.
The motivation behind my post was to claim that the original article is not news and not valuable. On a website that calls itself "Hacker News", I think it's important to talk about stuff like this. Maybe pretentious, but not valueless.

I also don't like how the financial news seems to lead people to throw their money away to traders by investing randomly and panicking every time the stock market burps. Even though the writers are probably mostly well-meaning, the stuff they write isn't helpful.
HTML5Rocks Gets Awesomer
"Another roof, another proof."
- Paul Erdos

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
Allston Trading is hiring Haskell/Erlang devs in Chicago
Since Clojure has been designed for concurrency, why does the author have to resort to Java thread pools to solve this straightforwardly parallel problem?
On the other hand, weekends aren't work days anymore (not for me, at least).
It's called "The Economy". I have something that you want, you have something that I want. We swap, usually using a token of exchange, and we're both better off for the exchange. That basic exchange, multiplied by technology, is why nearly everyone in the world will be much richer than their parents and why their children will be richer still.

Accountants, lawyers and bankers all perform services. Not fun services, but services nonetheless. They're no different from a musician or a masseuse or a bicycle mechanic.

Corporations generate lots of wealth and engage in lots of transactions, but so do the aggregate of small businesses and sole traders. There's nothing magical about a big company versus a small one.

The big change in the economy is that a) stuff has got very cheap and b) lots of people can do useful work from anywhere with WiFi. The basic rules are exactly the same, but the economy of 2030 will be barely recognisable, just as the economy of 2010 would be barely recognisable in 1990. As we generate more and more intangible wealth, tangible wealth becomes less and less important to the economy.

If you think that a service-based economy is a "perpetual motion machine", you really need to do a bit of reading up on economics. Wealth is wealth, it doesn't matter how you generate it as long as you do.
The posts by KurtG and georgecantor are good too.
Steve Jobs and the Star-On Machine
Thats odd because from a couple of friends in the publishing industry They prefer all the manuscripts to be plain text. The first step after they receive the manuscript is to remove all formatting so they can get it into their typesetting program with the least effort.

Why an author would prefer word or even open office over notepad is beyond me. Word count maybe? It gives almost no benefit and requires extra work when it's time to hand off the manuscript to the publisher.
By this logic, the entire economy is a "perpetual motion machine" - the only difference between the entire economy and your hypothetical is that the real economy has more moving parts.
In all likelihood, they wanted to be able to change the API as they see fit, and didn't want to have other people depending on an API that was changing rapidly. Can't fault them for that.
Thanks for the suggestion. I started the book this weekend and I'm 100 pages in. What I've seen so far isn't necessarily impressive, but there are some good common-sense techniques.
A vote for me is a vote for dipshit businesses everywhere
I had someone approach me with one of these "ideas" a while back, I remarked that a finders fee is usually 10% and he got furious and hung up the phone. Then he called back and agreed to the term "finders fee" but then claimed that it was worth 50%. Needless to say I declined.
Space is expensive monetarily, but how is it expensive psychologically?

I find _not_ having enough space to be psychologically expensive. Nothing better than going for a walk through your own house, knowing it's all yours and nobody can invade it. But hey, different people have different preferences...
Multi Touch Light Table - Graphic User Interface For Mobile DJs [video]
Privacy Zuckering
How can he be a DJ if he doesn't have turntables?
1Password just announced a Windows version to complement their existing, amazing Mac program. They also have iPhone/iPad versions. Doesn't help you with Linux though.

http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
I think the flashiness would not have mattered so much if Lycos's results had been better. If I recall, the search results I got from Lycos were poorer than WebCrawler or Alta Vista. There wasn't that much difference, though--every search engine's results were filled with spammy crap. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite etc. decided to attack the spam problem with brute force by creating human-edited portals.

When Google appeared on my radar in late 1999/early 2000, it was a revelation. For the first time in many years, I could enter a search term and have a 75% chance of success compared to sub-50% rate of other search engines. The gap in effectiveness was too large for any other search engine to bridge.

(This also sort-of explains why Bing will have a hard time unseating Google. Google has improved to about 95% accuracy for me. Even if Bing gets to 99.9% accuracy, I probably wouldn't notice the difference.)
"Persistence" - you know, while I find the other comments here pretty funny (ley lines, haha!), I sat up and said "yeah" when I got to persistence. That's a good insight - right now, our lives and data are all balkanized between devices, between services, and so forth. Something to tie things together is an obvious next step.
Fixing oil wells - The price of staying in the game
A few design suggestions:

(1) The pink doesn't look good for this kind of a website.
(2) The shadows in the screenshot are too bold. Bring them down to 15-30% opacity.
(3) The three big buttons in the middle of the page are wasting too much space without much apparent gain. Move them to the right and put some text explaining your product clearly (In 2-3 sentences) to the left. This will help visitors understand your product without much scanning.
(4) The screenshots do not look very appealing. Again, the pink is hurting my eyes here.

Pricing:

(1) Is this per month price or per survey price? Should be clearly specified.
(2) Either way, the price is too low.
Http://post.psctube.com/practical-tips-to-secure-your-home-2/
Could someone explain what the heck "One of the big contentious items is the addition in Java 5 of parametric polymorphism as a compile-time trick without also adding VM-level support for reifying per-type specializations as .NET can do." means for a language implementation layman?
My co-founder and I have been doing this for three years. We have two backpacks and we are nomadic.

Interestingly, it isn't online services that have enabled this so much as a lifestyle choice. We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city.

We don't use a lot of online services for our business. Biggest one is Gmail, really, and hosting. Things we couldn't take with us.

I run a virtual machine on my laptop and under it I have a server that acts as our "intranet server" and so all of the collaboration tools, etc run there. I also start servers periodically while developing something that will eventually run in the cloud to test it out before running it online.

We're geared to be able to work full time without access to the internet. We're expecting to be in places where there is no internet. However, for the past 3 years that we've been traveling we've had pretty much full time internet access so far. When we're without internet we use an ad-hoc wifi network so we always have our "local network" with us.

Other than what fits in the backpacks we just have a couple boxes in storage. The most stressful experience has been going over all of our stuff and getting rid of it until we fit in the laptop. That took several months of work and because many of the possessions had a history it was not easy.

But now, we can go anywhere anytime we want, just about. It is very liberating!

Am willing to answer most questions....
I don't really get where you're coming up with ".NET is seen as a rather dead-end ecosystem."

Perhaps in the Ruby community, the image of .NET is equivalent to the image of MS, but the people who make up the Ruby community were probably never going to use .NET to begin with. There is a very large development community outside of RoR and Clojure and Python and what have you that has very little overlap.

The Ruby/Python/PHP/etc. development communities coincide a lot. They have UNIX-like operating systems in common. They have certain shared values of what software development means to the human condition. Hell, they think about what software development means to the human condition. It's very future-centric.

In the Windows world, it's different. We think about things in terms of the present: what are we doing now, how does this fill my belly, how am I going to fulfill this client request so I can go home and play with my kids. We don't tend to participate in open source projects. Most of the time, it's weird to have someone ask to see my source code. Seeing the source code is a waste of time when all I want is the functionality. There is not much thought to future developers because future developers are likely not going to ever look at what we've made. Even if they did, they're more likely to throw it away and start over than to do anything with it.

I don't think there is an inherent "betterness" to one approach over the other. To me, it's the difference between a sculpture and a building contractor. A project manager with no technical background working at a bank is a comical character to the auteur, to the contractor he or she is a real person (maybe even a close friend) with a need.

But because of these differences, there is shockingly little overlap between the communities. I'm reminded of this any time I hang out with my friends at my local hackerspace. There are a few of us who are Windows developers who can work together very productively. There are others of us who are Linux developers and they can work together very productively. When the two try to mix at all, the minority group on the project invariably look like idiots, lost children, who haven't the experience they claim to have. The problem is the complete mindset disconnect.

I think that's where a lot of these "X is dead, long live Y" come from. When you are steeped in your development culture of choice, you hear nothing from "the others", and can very easily assume they must be dead.
It's a newspaper. They have to pay for that building somehow.
Death by PowerPoint Rule - anybody want to walk through this 117pg deck?
That's trying to pin a bit of an exaggerated worst interpretation on me, isn't it? We don't have to endorse or approve of things to see them for what they are.

Moreover, defense spending doesn't necessarily equate to violence. Look at the trillions spent during the cold war, paradoxically spent to avoid violence.
A Computer Forensics Process Tutorial
Fraudster is Just a Nice Word For Cybercriminal
We've tried some of these services out, though not specifically to solve this issue. When you add the cost of they add, the legit customers balk, driving volume down to the point where its not worth doing for our business.

As a result of this, what we do and what I suspect others do is ship to areas with low fraud rates direct, eat any losses and call it good. Anywhere that you eat more than you make, you simply stop.

The margin on something that would provide the security and keep small businesses interest would have to be razor thin. It would be a challenging or impossible business to run.
Sorry, I was just paraphrasing a line from the article.

He has talked a lot about the slave labour and the way groups are treated unfairly.
I always thought Hotbot was the best for geeks. I do miss AltaVista though.
Las Vegas is Las Vegas because it has the perception that "anything goes". So far Dubai has no casinos, a no-skin dress code, no alcohol in public, and they're cracking down on kissing. I'd say Vegas is safe for now.
Every investor has limited deal bandwidth, regardless of if they are an angel, a super angel, or a VC.

I guess the difference is that the new breed of "super angels" can provide a lot more technical help compared to traditional VCs.
Physically yes but not in any other sense. From the sounds of things he's not reduced the number of books and albums he owns, just changed the storage medium. It also mentions that he has a backpack full of "designer clothes" which suggests that he's just as hung up on the nature of the things he does have.

What's changed here is the medium but what would really be interesting is if there were a significant cultural shift but I don't see that - he still seems to be as much a consumer as he ever was.
Rolling Your Own (Free) Hosted S3 Stack
That's how Microsoft ended up with a bevy of undocumented API calls that still live today, with their internal software being among the largest offenders of using dated and problematic APIs.