skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. I was going to post earlier that I had a hunch Lycos was big is S. Korea after the main character in "My Sassy Girl" (2001) is seen using Lycos for his email. I figured that since it was 2001 it might not be the case anymore, but maybe it still is big out there.
Six Quick Questions with Chris Coyier
I recently had a chance to ask Chris Coyier, one of the most well know authors within the web design industry and curator of CSS-Tricks, some quick questions and catch up with what he has been up to lately.
what's the point of "more encryption than you have now" if it can be disabled by mitm (this includes the 'wireless networks' cited as a good reason to use it) and you don't even know if it's working? if i want to use encryption, i want to know its encrypted. there is no point otherwise.

an example: i'm using an unencrypted network and plaintext protocol. if there's no attacker on the network, my data is "safe." if there is an attacker, my data is effectively compromised.

if i'm using this solution around the same network connection and there is no attacker on the network, my data is safe. if there is an attacker, they'll see it's this lame attempt at encryption, disable it through mitm, and my data is effectively compromised.

in a real life setting i can't depend on this to secure my data. however, ssh, openvpn, ipsec and other solutions provide assured encryption (unless you screw up the configuration). you don't even need a CA with ssh or openvpn - copy your keys or certs by a usb key once and you immediately have a strong defense against mitm.

i'd love to see sites provide a secure encryption alternative to SSL which allows for out-of-band transfer of secure keys and 1-to-1 authentication to prevent a nation's clandestine operations from peeking at my traffic. that probably won't happen though. in the meantime i protect my last-mile access with a secured tunnel; i just pray SSL is strong enough to not be attacked at a hop from my tunnel endpoint to the site.
Of course! Your feedback is gold. Thank you so much for it.
I'm pretty sure the people who pay money for it regret it afterwards.
The ozone layer's better now, since we banned the handful of chemicals that were depleting it and it's had years to recover.
'This is why the corporations dominate: They know the "little guys" like us don't think it's worth it to disrupt their industries.'

Also, huge advantages in terms of economies of scale, financing, lawyers, patent portfolios... and if you are successful, they buy you or you become a big corporation...
I'm happy for the author and wish him success. But the assumption that being a good developer can make you rich is misleading.

Reading PG may create the impression that building a successful company is an engineering-like process, deterministic and repeatable. It is not. It's a chaotic process that cannot be reliably planned. Thinking "Zuckerberg coded a PHP app, I can code a PHP app" is like thinking "That old lady bought a lottery ticket. I can buy a lottery ticket.."

Building a smaller business that supports a few people is a different story (and a worthy goal unto itself). But that's not "sitting on a goldmine".

EDIT: Just wanted to add I have huge respect for this guy, building a business while supporting a family. My beef, such as it is, is with simplistic picture of startups often painted in HN. The actual people giving it a go, you have to respect.
Ask any winner to forward you their electronic plane ticket with in 48 hours, otherwise you might hand out free pass to people who would never turn out anyway ...
Yes there is, think about it :)

Bank of America has a CA signed cert, so when you go there you display a golden "YOU ARE SECURE, CITIZEN" banner at the top with a lock icon etc.

But if someone doesn't have a CA signed SSL cert you treat it no differently than normal HTTP traffic.

Then you train users not to submit their financial information to sites that don't have a CA signed SSL certificate (as indicated by the giant "YOU ARE SECURE, CITIZEN" banner).

You have to do that anyway, when I go do my online banking I visit a plain http site and then click on my private banking link that takes me to a https site.

The easiest way for a MitM to spoof that would be to just direct the user to a plain HTTP site when he goes to do his private banking. So even today users have to understand that they must submit this sort of data over SSL and that the cert involved has to be CA-signed.
Yeah this is completely backwards to me -- do you want the illusion of progress? Or progress? Often they are mutually incompatible.
The performance comparison to SSL is not really fair, since tcpcrypt does not offer security against passive attackers.
ITunes in Ubuntu 10.04 via VirtualBox
What sort of person goes to a conference like Usenix and connects to an external server for the first time? I've been to a dozen conferences, all of whom I've used ssh at, and I've never connected to an external box for the first time.
Meh. Won't work. Your phrasing and vocabulary are distinctive - a sufficiently smart (or brute force) AI could track you through all your aliases. Not to mention you are bound to leave a paper trail that Google could follow. If they let your anonymity stand, it's because they deliberately chose not to look.
Not true. Drew's co-founder is Arash Ferdowsi.

My understanding is that he applied to YC (his second application) alone but was told to go out and find a co-founder.
I like Steve's PL posts a lot, but I don't understand why he has to hate on static type systems so much. I appreciate and use both dynamic and static languages all the time, and both have their own respective strengths and weaknesses. There are some problems for which a static type system is extremely helpful, and others where no type system can really express the problem well. To say that a whole active branch of CS that affects the most popular languages in current use is worthless is a little presumptuous of him.
As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

—Alexis de Tocqueville

I agree with everything in this post 100%—it's spot on and well worth meditating on over the course of several years, combined with some serious reading in the ancient philosophers.

Ultimately, ain't it a bitch that the law of diminishing marginal utility causes the demand curve to have a negative slope!?

IMHO, that happens to be the best proof that a gift culture is a higher ideal to aim for than an efficiently allocated capitalist society premised on the FUD illusion of artifical scarcity. It is better to give than to receive(or accumulate) after all. (I recommend the writings of Buckminster Fuller more than nearly anything).

Everything that everyone thinks matters, doesn't. I can't wait for the day when American "culture" gains the escape velocity to free itself from its own materialism. On the bright side, the American Empire is well on the way to smashing into the rocks, and shattering into an impoverished 3rd world nation. At least our collective happiness, sanity and basic decency will be restored.
I also like "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" which essentially goes into thinking sort of questions that we today take for granted.
For instance:
1) What arithmetic operations should one put into hardware ?
2) Do we really need main memory ?
3) How should I/O look like ?
Fascinating read.
So what about the potential affect a systemic inflammation might have on cholesterol mentioned in TFA? If a person were suffering from some sort of systemic inflammation (would something like Crohn's Disease count?) have an increase in cholesterol?
Before poo-poo'ing the idea, consider that a conspiracy isn't required for Google to be unconcerned with paid app sales. Android only exists because Google was afraid of being cut out of mobile search advertising. Their priority has been getting a competitive OS with a prominent Google search box on as many handsets as possible. Paid app revenue is something of a sideshow. (Even with paid apps, Android isn't going to turn a profit in the short term, so why worry about minor revenue streams?) I'm sure Google doesn't want a shitty, disorganized app store that can't collect payments or rampant piracy, but they aren't exactly hurting Android yet, so why should they worry about it?

Edit: Even worse, Google apparently doesn't get any revenue from paid app sales. Their 30% cut goes to the carrier. (Thanks gregholland!)
boo Godwin.
IIRC, the ozone layer is actually getting thicker since Chlorofluorocarbon are no longer getting used.
I'm currently writing a compiler. Drop me a line.
I can't imagine what possible point you could be trying to make. Am I making this up or not? I doubt I am, but who cares? The issue with first-connection security in SSH is a fact, not an opinion.
Think harder. How does Firefox know, when it sees a self-signed certificate, that that site wasn't supported to have a certificate signed by a CA?

It doesn't, and can't.

If the "ZOMG" warning --- which, let's just keep calling it that, because I think it's funny that you think one of the most important pieces of UI in Internet security is a "ZOMG" measure --- didn't exist, attackers could substitute their own "self-signed" certificates for Bank of America's Verisign-signed cert when hijacking www.bankofamerica.com.
your lottery ticket analogy is excellent :)
Although you CAN buy apps on the New Zealand market place, as a developer in New Zealand, you CANNOT sell any apps!

As a developer you need to be in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom or United States to set up a merchant account.

I had an email conversion with Tim Bray about this...

He said: "I hear you. We're working on lots more countries. It's an amazing amount of work to do each one. -Tim"

But did not indicate any timeline :(
Almost every niche website I look at still relies very heavily on handles. Harry Potter fanfiction (and fandom in general) uses handles much more than real names. So do gymnastics message boards. So do sci-fi/fantasy book message boards. So does NaNoWriMo. So does gaming, obviously.

I think what you're observing is that as people grow up and become more "successful", a larger proportion of their social contacts become professional contacts. There's a very strong tendency in professional spheres to use your real name, because that's what you do business under. A large portion of America, however, works at the mall, or Starbucks, or WalMart, or other random McJobs where you can't really build a career. For them, using their real name gains them essentially no benefit but can easily cost them their job.
500 dollars a month business is better than nothing. It could even fund your kids' college fund.
Amazing, I can imagine how effective this policy would be. For me I would definitely feel guilty taking a vacation day when I know I had important stuff to do, or I had been slacking. However, I can't speak for the sociopaths who work there.
Same problem for me:

http://i.imgur.com/isg5H.png

Firefox 3.6.8, Windows 7.

Otherwise, great design and idea.
Mechanisms of Exclusion
Some forms of hepatic inflammation can lead to increased cholesterol synthesis.

It's not clear why, say, intestinal inflammation would lead to an increase in cholesterol, and I'm not aware of evidence suggesting that it does so. Perhaps it does, but the research isn't there yet, and from a clinical standpoint it's not used.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15787706
"I remember taking the courses, but there was a huge amount of information that got shoved into my head and remained there just long enough to pass the exams and now it's gone."

I'm sure there's a more technical term for this, and to some extent this is my personal experience, but: In general, to learn something you need a "hook", some information "nearby" that you have mastered and the new thing you are learning is just an incremental step from. It is very easy in a school environment to be pushed along at what is a bad pace for you, miss one of the "hooks", and be screwed for the entire rest of the course.

However, as long as you didn't entirely disengage, you will probably find if you go back and cover the topic again yourself, you will end up learning it faster the second time around that you would if there was no first time around. I have found in my experience that literally just re-reading the chapters I had "covered" before and combining that with the subsequent years of experience in the field would suddenly make it go "click".

In fact, when learning a new skill or field of knowledge from a book, this is deliberately how I learn now; read as much of the book as I can possibly stand, then go back to the beginning and start over. It sounds like you're wasting your time, it is actually quite time-effective, though there's a bit of art to the "as much as I can possibly stand".

If you still have your books, try just re-reading. If you don't, get some textbooks and try again. You might be surprised.

I would not recommend actually trying to go back and re-take a course; it is very likely that that will be a waste of time vs. this plan, unless you were so utterly lost that you truly learned nothing in which case somebody was negligent for letting you pass at all. At the very least try this first; it doesn't even have to take that long.
This definitely doesn't come as a surprise to me. As I've gotten older, I've grown more "in tune" with my body, and I feel fatigued when I'm lacking sleep. Back when I was a young teenager I felt the same every day, regardless of how much sleep I'd gotten. Now I always take my vitamins every morning, make sure to hit the right food groups -- otherwise I feel super crappy.
Verizon demos 1Gbps Fios connection
"Why introduce this HTML/HTTP thing when we have Gopher? Don't re-invent the wheel!"

Re-inventing the wheel is good. It's the only way we'll ever get better wheels.
Would you consider LabView, Scratch, and Logo compilers/interpreters?
Right now I'm working on a little something of my own, and if I can reach 500$ a month that will almost cover half of my college tuition :) (state school)
Lots of competition compared to what?

The fact is, if you can write code, you are a very small number of people in the world. If you are good at it, and enjoy it, even smaller.

This is the point the author it trying to make, you are an an amazing position in history, you can do great things, so much easier than anyone else. In the past, you would have had to have an army. Now, just with your skills, you can do something truly amazing and world changing.
And god help you if you write games. At some point in my career I'll pass the billion hours of time wasted, at which point I won't know whether to celebrate or cry. Thankfully that day is still 5-10 years off.
The Lost Huffman Paper
Totally agree. Less code is good which is what you get with TDD in the application itself. But you do end up with a pile of tests which are code.

What I see this is as you plug straight into the positive reinforcement part of your brain where you reward yourself over time then have a big reward at the end. Thats the biggest advantage that TDD gives you because it makes coding addictive like games can become.
Try sending promo codes to people who work at: TSR (or WOTC or whatever it's part of these days); Steve Jackson Games; Palladium (or whomever owns it now).

If Dragon Magazine is still around, send them a few promo codes too. Get involved in D+D discussion forums and (politely) plug your app.

Maybe $1.99 is too high. Maybe not. I can't really judge that. I can tell you, though—from experience as a developer and consumer of iPhone apps—that $0.99 is much more of an impulse purchase than $1.99 is.

Heck, maybe you can mark the app as "ON SALE! $0.99 for two weeks only! And use that as part of your pitch to the aforementioned companies, magazines and web forums."
Just out of curiosity how are more tests (assuming they are useful tests) the illusion of progress? They provide value if they are well written, so they are progress are they not?
Ok, so there is nothing you can cut out from your life? Watching tv, lunches, buses? There are all times you could be putting to better use.

And there is no magic balance. There is no magic allotment of time you have to spend relaxing to be mentally well. It is all about how hard you push yourself, and how slack you are.

Nobody is saying cut out the important things, but cut out the stupid things. But hey, it is not for everybody.
Yes, first-connection security is not an option. But the vast majority of connections are not first connections.

If I ssh to a new box at home, then go to Usenix and ssh warns me that the host key changed I'll have protected against MitM attacks, even if the original connection wasn't authenticated.
It's the exact same risk really, and that is it's very, very easy to make a game nobody plays on Flash, Android or iOS.
Did the Onion get a new domain?
Solution: A friend of mine is named Dave Matthews. He is ungooglable.
You need to change something if that is true? I am guessing you do not exercise, and do not eat well. It is amazing how you can put a little effort in, and change a lot.
I don't know enough about LabView and Scratch to say one way or another (I just learned about both from your reply).

Logo is often implemented as an interpreter, not a compiler.
A simple point. DMCA notices may be good, but you got to show that your services are worth the effort. Large companies don't need you, small companies might not care whatsoever.
I was about to mention this guy myself. Kudos!
I appreciate the author acknowledging some of the hurdles and warning signs that could portend against OpenStack's viability. There are currently an impressive array of organizations pledging support, but talk is cheap. (Very cool that patches are flowing in from some of them already.)

I think the most important signal is another serious provider stepping up alongside of Rackspace with a compatible OpenStack offering. Until then, this is just Rackspace's cloud implementation. Albeit a completely open one that you could in theory replicate on your own hardware, but I imagine that option would be small comfort to most people using IaaS clouds.

Still, it's awesome that they're trying to make it happen, and I'll be rooting for them.
As I wrote, a worthy goal unto itself but not "sitting on a goldmine".
The paid App Store or Android market will never be a revenue stream for Apple or Google. In fact it is probably designed to be break-even at best. They need interesting apps to push their respective platforms further - that's where the gold mine is for both companies (apple gets to sell more hardware and goog gets more searches)
One issue is that VCs actively don't like being invested companies that just hang around and don't do much. When VCs invest they want to be on the board so they can give the company direction. But now they have to do that, month after month, year after year, and the company keeps on taking their time energy. Perhaps eventually it dies, or eventually it gets sold for 2-3x investment, but either way it doesn't wind up being worth the opportunity cost of the time spent on it.

Therefore VCs aren't going to encourage having more of these deals unless the VCs can find ways to reduce their ongoing time commitment. (I note that YC invests in lots of companies with much less of an ongoing time commitment than VCs have. But YC has a very different value proposition and business model.)
In a similar vein, some of the best apps are made by non-US developers, but neither of my [American] credit cards works buying apps in non-USD.

(Not sure if Apple has the same limitation, or whether they "solve" that problem by only showing American apps, but I never ran into it there.)
You entertain people. It is an honest occupation. (Paraphrased from Tom Clancy, in response to the question "Do you write literature?")
Some thoughts:

1. You don't have enough reviews. Your app store search rankings will improve once an actual rating is computed. Give away some apps, or even make it free for a few days. Note that free apps == crap ratings however..

2. The name: Was "dice roller" or "Die roller" taken? With the way the app store search works, the easiest way to get traffic is to have a name that has a high natural search volume. Basically, high search volume on google == high search volume on the app store (in my experience 1/10th-1/20th).

3. Do a free version supported by iAds. The CPM there is still high, I'm seeing $10-$20CPM, and with 5-10 units per day at $1.99, you should be looking at 2-300 units for a free version easily. Might also increase sales of full version.
you shouldn't care about the statistics of single founder success rates.

If you have an absolutely dynamite, compelling idea and can communicate it your business will get funded.

Investors do not discriminate against you just because you are solo. If your idea is good and you are solo they might play the entrepreneur match making game and introduce you to people that can assisst you.
Yes, it doesn't, and can't. But I'm saying that it doesn't matter.

When people visit "foo-bank.com" the easiest way to do a MitM is to simply do a http MitM. Then you don't have to forge any SSL certificates, or rely on the browser not yelling enough.

The only way to guard against that is to train users to recognize that they shouldn't be sending money through a non-CA SSL connection, as indicated by their browser with a friendly "Secure" icon somewhere.

Thus, if browsers treated non-CA signed SSL connections just like normal HTTP connections, i.e. just used encryption, didn't present any "secure" banners etc. you wouldn't make things any less secure.

Non-CA signed SSL traffic is just as secure as unencrypted HTTP traffic (i.e. not), and browsers should treat both of them equivalently.
I hate Ruby On Rails
need a robots.txt for my identity?

yet another thing to manage...
If the US Navy had carried through on mining Japan's home waters, it would have been irrelevant who occupied Manchuria or Korea. Nothing would have reached Japan. If carried out, naval blockade would have slaughtered gobs and gobs of folks through 45-46. As I recall, there was only one un-incinerated city left (Kyoto) after the two atomic strikes, so "bouncing the rubble" would have been inefficient.

Slaughtering concentrations of defenders, however, would have been gruesome and it WAS being planned for.
Thats a limitation with your credit cards. Mine can bill in any currency required (obviously, followed by a currency conversion fee, and the conversion itself being completed at rates seemingly VERY favorable to the bank/cc company).
Payment friction is the enemy of many plans. If you don't account for it in your model, prepare for possible doom.
Maybe Google is hoping that someone will fork the app store side of things, and it won't be their problem anymore?
The point is to upgrade the connections that are unencrypted now to use encryption. A MitM can only insert his own data into your dialog, he can't passively eavesdrop on an existing encrypted connection.
Yep, the difference between them is that Apple had the luxury of waiting a year before tackling the app store (and experience with iTunes to draw from) whereas Google needed an app store on Day 1, albeit a store they could neglect.
Sorry for the noob question, but what does "python 3 interface" mean?
Life without a Certificate Authority
It's because all these self-taught PHP developers think it's some kind of affront to have to pay $25 for a CA-signed certificate for their shopping cart application.

Even though you can now get CA-signed certificates for free ( eg http://cert.startcom.org/ )!
http://www.amazon.com/Authenticity-Hoax-Lost-Finding-Ourselv...