skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm comfortable with separate identities per site, but it is impractical for most people. You have three general choices:

- Maintain a separate login and password for every site. This requires a lot of memorization and is a pain in the ass when you find yourself trying four passwords because you forgot which you used.

- Use password management software or a naming system that lets you keep track. This is effective but is a bit much for a majority of people who do not, and probably never will, use tools and reasoning to help them do things on their own volition.

- Use the same login and password almost everywhere. This is easy but is shitty security.

You might claim that using a third-party authenticator is just like option #3, but it's not. Option #3 above means that your single credentials are under the control of the least secure site you use them on, so if someone cracks some install of PHPBB version 0.0001 that you logged into, you're fucked. Using a third-party auth provider relieves you from this worry. It even means that you can switch at your leisure and start using a hardware generator or a long passphrase if the provider supports it.
Just want to say I'm really happy you wrote this post.

Unannounced changes to the platform - breaking core things we were working with - under deadline, with a client recently resulted in one of the worst disasters I've ever had to deal with on a project. It devolved into the collapse of a startup, not getting paid for almost half of the work we did, sleepless nights trying to hack impossible workarounds, a shady last-ditch buyout deal and multiple shouting matches with otherwise rational executives over un-realized expectations.

Facebook, get your freakin act together.
Nothing you do on the site you signed in with is published to your Facebook profile, without your explicit consent on a dialog box

The trouble with this statement is that some users (myself included) don't believe (a) this is true even when they say it's true, or (b) that if it's true today it will still be true tomorrow.

Such paranoid users are worried that FB will make a privacy policy change that turns the privacy off "as a benefit to users," and the opt-out checkbox will be buried seven links deep. I try to use FB's controls to make my FB stuff fairly private, but I still operate on the assumption that one day FB will break my assumptions about what is or isn't shared.

The recent "Places" launch confirmed it for me. If I hadn't read someone else's blog post, I wouldn't have known that simply refusing to opt into places wasn't enough, I also had to explicitly block friends from checking me into locations.
1) I dislike the current organization for college+ level schools. That's an entirely different issue. And, given that this approach is a bit... liberal in its views of students, it's less likely to be taken by anyone without tenure. In which case they're nearly immune to feedback like that if they can demonstrate their system. At least, in my experience.

2) Yeah, but then you're in an entirely different style of class, and it probably doesn't have a lot of busy-work homework like objectively-testable (if there is such a thing) classes can generate. Though please, point some out to me if you've had any, I'm quite interested in how education is handled :)
There are no apps that will save you from that kind of decision.
I wish more games had some kind of machine learning decide what was hard enough. There's nothing that feels quite is weak as picking one far from the hardest setting and still getting annihilated!
~/.ssh/authorized_keys:

from="proxy.thimbl.net",command="finger-wrapper" ssh-rsa AAAA...

Very doable.

Based on what tricknik has said so far, this strikes me as an HTML5 WebSocket spawning SSH. Similar to what was discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1694607

Great idea, I had awesome .plan files way-back-when and spend most of my time in my shell.

Updating my micro-blog with cat >> .plan ... ^D would be enjoyable. I am looking forward to your work!
Not if you are bootstrapping. That whole free forever thing has a way of backfiring (more often than not);
I take it as a validation of how meaningless most business news is. Take Microsoft out of the equation so there is no emotional spark and replace it with IBM or Oracle. Both kill Twitter and Facebook in revenues and net income, but I rarely see anything about them in the news. Just because they're not interesting doesn't mean they're not profitable.
Automated password resets are a solved problem. Either email a new pw or reset link to a known address, or authenticate with "secret questions".

Both have their problems, but no small company should waste support time when established techniques are available.
Frameworks for social networks
I want to make a specialiced social network and don't want to reinvent the wheel, do you know some Open source groovy framework to easy my job?, is groovy a good language to make social networks?
"Napping won't begin to take hold in companies until leaders recognize that it's not the number of hours people work that determines the value they create, but rather the energy they're capable of bringing to whatever hours they work."

This stood out to me as the most important statement in the article. The problem is that a large chunk our society is based upon measurable quantities, whether they make sense or not (see: 40 hour work weeks, GPA, etc). Unfortunately, human potential energy is not quantifiable (yet).
Dude, that's a pretty cool looking photo you've got there.

+1 for the hat. :)
What's the smiley for?

Python 2.6.5...
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> (a, (b, c, (d, e))) = (1, (2, 3, (4, 5)))
>>> a, b, c, d, e
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
>>> (a, (b, c, (d, e))) = (1, (2, 3, (4, 5, 6)))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: too many values to unpack

It isn't quite as flexible as functional languages and it's not as idiomatic as it is in functional languages, but it's not a hack or quirky edge-case either.
Depends on which is more important. If it's an egregious error for there to be more than one element then I'd prefer the unpacking solution. However if ordering is/was involved at some point a set would indicate a possible bug (since they're unordered) so I might lean towards indexing.

They are both decent ideas, not hard fast rules. Let your context be your guide.
What makes me nervous about singing into a site through Facebook is I don't know what kind of permissions I'm giving to the site regarding my FB account.
I'm wondering if we'll see prices drop now that ZFS for linux is more mature.

It's pretty much the ideal FS for this sort of application and the only thing that's been holding it back has been its tie to Solaris.
Good post and good tips. I'm aware of most of them but the reminder is definitely helpful to keep me blogging.
FYI, check the links at the end to Spencer fry, marco arment, and Gruber. Insanely useful resources and genuinely good advice.
He's advising you to avoid using stock photos of models, ala the pictures of suited people offering their hands in his blog post. Use actual pictures of the people involved.
Can you clarify what you mean by a fixed reference and a ground-based reference? They sound the same to me, although for the latter I believe you may be talking about a VORTAC or other radio-based ground station, as opposed to pilotage(looking outside and seeing the ground).
I agree. I don't know why it's not also a matter of privacy for site owners. They're handing Facebook their entire usage data. Dumb dumb dumb.
If you're interested in a web-based calculator, I've found this one to be useful:
http://www.usereffect.com/split-test-calculator
My betting money is that Pike et al. will produce YANOS (yet another new OS), quite possibly mostly written in the Go programming language, really well suited for huge compute clusters.

Can't wait to see what kernel programming in Go will be like.
I almost can't believe the #3, restarting a webserver for minor changes? That reeks of static, batch-language oriented solution. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with static batch-languages, but I wouldn't have thought Scheme is one.
It may not be published (2), but facebook certainly tracks and stores the information.
3 Quick Lessons from My Failed Project on Kickstarter.com
The idea is that you "waste" 30 minutes, but then get that back in the form of heightened productivity for the last 3 or 4 hours of work.
Welcome Windows Live Spaces Bloggers (Microsoft + Wordpress)
The real solution is not to arbitrarily encode your types as lists of exactly one item. If you find yourself passing around such lists with enough regularity that you feel the need to develop an idiom for deconstructing them, you're doing something wrong.
Same experience here. I know a lot of people that are not even good at learning word by word but somehow manage to go through university

I can add my experience for jobs too: most of the times people get jobs because employers do not bother to verify if they are good or not. This has sadly happened in half the companies I've been. Where I'm working now there are a couple of persons working as developers that don't know how to program and don't even have a background in programming or computer science just because the two non technical founders did not bother to have some technical guy at the interviews to verify the candidates.
Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.

-- Tom West, quoted by Tracy Kidder in The Soul of a New Machine (Modern Library, 1997). ISBN 0-679-60261-5

Commentary: Data General is no longer with us.

References:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_West

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General
Choice. Let people choose if they want to use Facebook, or if they want to log in directly. Allowing people to log in directly should be the minimum requirement. Facebook should be an addon authentication system, not the only.
do you think it's worth fixing deeper stuff, like arrays of numbers being lexically sorted?
Go is in a "public beta" status, i.e. what you see right now is its development, not its refinement. It basically hasn't reached a 1.0 release version yet. Participants of the mailing list are very early adopters who write some libraries for it. It's still likely enough that important parts of the language spec will change in non-compatible ways, and especially the standard library still isn't too stable (e.g. the http module is a bit orphaned right now).

But the progress is quite impressive, and it might hit a niche for lots of people (those Zed Shaw tends to call "longbeards"). Unix systems programming is still dominated by C, as there aren't that many valid alternatives. Java is systems programming for the Java system, C++ is C++. Ocaml is probably one step too far for bit pushers. And then there's the pedigree of the developers.

I think within a year the language should have matured enough. If someone manages to come up with a "killer application" for it (c.f. RoR/Ruby or node.js/server-side Javascript), it might take off.

It might also end up like Modula-3.
I'm impressed by Matt Mullenweg. I think the folks over at Posterous could learn a few things from him.
Joyent API /heart (Node SmartMachine)
No, that's not what's happening. Microsoft is migrating these users to Wordpress.com, an existing hosted blogging service. They're getting accounts there and their blog posts are being imported. Microsoft isn't running Wordpress.org software.
He got married; much later, he stopped blogging.
On my site (www.dipoll.com) I offer FB connect, Twitter connect, and regular email/password registration. 95% of my users join with Facebook connect.

I may very well do away with Twitter and email registration. Some of those 5% of new users might use Connect, and some might leave. That's fine. What I care about is streamlining the experience for the vast majority of my user base.

"I too believe you should have your own auth system as a base, but maybe someone can provide some numbers proving that it actually is a waste."

This is the way to look at it. Each service should test, analyze their numbers, and make the decision that makes sense for them. Blanket statements like "startups should never only use X for authentication" are just wrong.
I think this is a hard question to answer without a solid definition of popular.

That said, at our startup we use Go for all server side work and I wrote Go production code while still working for Google. In my little world it's very popular, the only other language we use is Javascript.
The Rise of "Worse is Better"
I'm glad my photo and hat gets us some extra points! Everything helps I suppose =)

To give credit where credit is due, my good friend Jay B Sauceda here in Austin took that photo (he's awesome): http://www.jaybsauceda.com/
I can see the advantages of both the fb login and your own authentication. On getappsdone.com we use our own authentication, but sometimes is really annoying dealing with people who can't figure out their user or password, or maybe they didn't receive the activation email and stuff like that.

On the other hand when I'm offered the change to login with facebook, not always I feel comfortable giving access to all my data.
Anyone know if taking these short naps during the day affect one's ability to fall asleep at night?
Facebook always displays an allow page with what data the site is requesting.
The reason I got one of those vanity accounts that Facebook hyped up was because I was under the impression they would use that instead of your real name on various websites.

Turns out they did not go that route so I refuse to use FB login.
The reason it's not in the Python style guide is because it's a symptom of other problems in code. Lists are for holding multiple values of the same type. If you know that a list will always have one and only one value, it's not conceptually a list, it's some other type that's been encoded into a list for some reason, and you should fix that conceptual mismatch rather than papering over the issue with a style idiom.
OpenID works great for this too-- you can create your own OpenID provider.
Lengthen My URL
I won't send a letter to the USPTO, or Congress, or any other government entity for that matter, regarding patents. Instead I will amass a great deal of influence and wealth by purchasing and applying for and litigating on patents, and then I will use this wealth to pay for special interests groups that will fight on my behalf (and ensure that I can) continue to do so. Good Day!
Your Hookup on Fedora 14
Really sorry about you giving up an income stream - I hope you've found other, better, more rewarding projects to work on.

So, can I have your clients, then? =)
tl;dr -- if the only reason you'd consider "swallowing the bitter pill" of programming in JS on the server is because of the fallacy that you can get a single codebase for the client and server, then node isn't for you.

Way to knock down the straw man, you really showed 'em.

Look around on http://nodejs.org/ and tell me where I can read that one of node's stated goals was to facilitate a single codebase between the client and server?

Head on over to the node.js mailing list and you'll find a very sharply divided community when it comes to this question (one codebase for client/server), not surprisingly.

In my opinion, many (although certainly not all) of the people out there talking about one-codebase-to-rule-them-all are doing so mostly out of a shallow grasp of the domains in question. I'm not trying to be derisive here or bring the wrath of the gods down upon me, but you just have to accept that the client and server are different environments/platforms, period. Attempts to seek the "silver bullet" in this regard will end as most, if not all, other such attempts have: outright failure or, at best, mediocrity.

Putting the merits (or lack thereof) of my previous paragraph aside, if the question in your mind that follows from that is: "then why use node? javascript blows/is meh/is not ruby/etc?", well, I would respectfully beg to differ. The laissez-faire nature of javascript is pretty empowering, to me, and I enjoy it greatly. Additionally, node.js is novel in the manner in which is leverages the power of V8 and is built from, basically, the bare-metal on-up as an evented architecture (the same cannot be said for twisted or eventmachine). It's more than just throwing a bone to developers with a predominantly client/javascript-based portfolio and I think it's disingenuous to dismiss or characterize node's appeal as such (and yeah, now I'm building the straw men).
Because it's promoted by a company with institutional ADD?

/snark
Have you ever looked into Lua? It's like a more mature version of Javascript. The overall design has a lot in common, but unlike JS, Lua didn't get frozen before its early design errors could be fixed (due to the browser wars) - instead it has had 15+ years of gradual refinement.

It's targeted at scripting C / C++ applications rather than web sites. It's great as a standalone scripting language, too.
> C++ and Java are the gold-standard for library-centric concurrency methodologies

The last time I checked concurrency isn't possible with standard C++. And multi-threaded programming in Java has been called many things, but "gold-standard" isn't one of them.
I'd add union/overlay filesystems are in FreeBSD since at least 6.1 and became stable ca 2007. I use this stuff quite often.
Yup, but do note that the calculator you linked is based on Chi-square and the one in excel is based on z-test. So, results may differ slightly!

In case you need to use a web-based calculator (z-test), here is one on my site: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-split-significance-calc...
still, I will say that it is a victory for open source community!
Hey, I'm totally down with that attitude.

My point is that if your DRM is going to be so minimal anyway, why bother? It doesn't seem like this approach is likely to convince very many people to buy the software who wouldn't otherwise, and it surely takes time and resources to set up and run.
More often than not you are receiving a list from some function, not constructing it manually.

As an example: Say you have a GUI widget that can contain many entries, and you call `widget.get_entries()` which returns a list with all the entries. But if you know there must be only one entry, you can do `(entry,) = widget.get_entries()`.
A quick Google tells me that he's the founding developer of WordPress, but that's all I know of him. Could you elaborate on your statement?
Oh no, I understand completely. If my personal homepage works in IE7, it's a fortunate, but unintended happening altogether.

That said, I was very interested in CoffeeScript as part of my job is to write new whiz-bang features into applications that run on older browsers (such as the IE7 I visited you on today.)

Bear in mind, CoffeeScript especially appeals to people in my position. It just sucks I can't read it / play with it now.

Still, I've bookmarked it for later reading from home, so hopefully I won't forget.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The point is that here B is "is a generalist rather than a specialist" and A is "sleeps more than a specialist".

If the claim is "generalists sleep more than specialists" then any instance where a specialist sleeps more is a refutation of the claim if it's made in a very strong form (all generalists sleep more than all specialists) and evidence against the claim if it's made in a weaker form (generalists tend to sleep more than specialists).

(It might in some cases be only very weak evidence. Indeed, I think it is only weak evidence here; armadillos and sloths are just two particular cases. So far as I know, though, there's no particular tendency for more-generalist animals to sleep longer.)
Windows Phone 7 won’t support tethering after all
If you add the dimension of the lifetime of the ant, then it becomes a spiral, hence death spiral.
Seems he would have more fun being a Rubyist.
Scala/Lift is pretty new technology, and most of its success stories are about scaling. So unless you really expect to have huge performance demands from the very start or would have a huge advantage if you could leverage Java libraries, I'd say that you'd get more mileage out of Ruby on Rails.

Functional languages do have the advantage that most programmers that know them tend to be quite good, but I don't know if this is as true for Scala as it would be for Lisp, Haskell or Ocaml, as it seems that a lot of Scala programmers aren't in the functional camp, but more in the fed-up-with-Java one. And the quality of Java developers is all over the place…
Official post from WordPress.com: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/welcome-windows-live...
I prefer array.single(), I think it's a rare enough use-case that spelling out what you are doing is worthwhile.
If this ever becomes popular, I expect orthorexia rates to soar.
I recently integrated JanRain into a client's site and I think I will be using it for future personal projects. It handles all the OAuth/OpenID details while providing Facebook/Twitter/OpenID/LinkedIn/Yahoo/Microsoft Live/Google/Wordpress/and more providers.

I would like to give people the Facebook option, but I myself, don't use it unless I have to. Giving a dozen options via JanRain makes that easier.
Elderly Zombies Win the Undying Loyalty of Their Fans
I agree completely.
The whole Facebook login thing is of no use to me since I decided to deactivate my account 12 months or so ago. I am unhappy with Facebook privacy and to be honest, the whole thing of keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc just became too much.
Devise an authentic login or lose me as a customer.
IPad in Education: How It's Going
Plan9 doesn't have releases, it has continual development.
Matt has actually been steering Wordpress in a very vendor neutral way. As much as Wordpress is free opensource software that usually runs on unixes, it has always been windows friendly - and runs on the azure platform as a launch partner.

It's not hard to see why Microsoft would want to continue their partnership.
> you cannot expect [the other side] to follow the whole debate

Perhaps you can explain this to me. E.g. the whole healthcare discussion seems to be "interesting" to both sides, but I've seen very few civil and sensible discussions. Is the debate so divorced from reality that either side has its own facts? (I know the Republican fanatics believe really stupid things, and I presume the Democrat fanatics are no better; but these are not the majority, right? Just loud.)
I just came off of a project where we built the entire auth system on facebook. No other regi options - just facebook.

I will never do that again. If that was to become the standard, facebook shot themselves in the foot with their crappy APIs anyhow (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1731427 )

And I have a facebook account, and I'm really hesitiant to like or authorize anything for fear of the author (or hacker) using it for malicious purposes or Facebook one day making my actions public etc. I think a lot of folks are too.

FB may have been seen by some folks over the last few months as the magic solution to universal social media authentication but I think its becoming apparent that it is not. And thats a good thing.
Furthermore, makes it harder for some of us to use your service at work. My work will let me visit Facebook, but each access is logged and IT does track it. While I can notify IT that it's a valid work use, doing this for every site that causes a similar reaction from the firewall gets tiring after a while.

The harder you make it for us to visit, even if it's a minor inconvenience, the less likely we will.
Yes, this is far closer to the common indie experience than minecraft.
Oh, I think Facebook is much worse. I'm just pointing out that there really is a problem to be solved; separate authentication for every site is not obviously the best possible experience. Choice is a fine answer, if the developers are willing to spend the extra time implementing and maintaining the choices.