skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought the idea was really cool and appreciated not having to decipher warped text to fill out a CAPTCHA until I saw this example: http://www.solvemedia.com/images/uni.jpg

Your site would have to provide a LOT of value to make me want to watch a video to sign up for it (or, heaven forbid, to just comment anonymously).
Please read my post. Specifically the second paragraph where exactly this issue is addressed.
I haven't 'obeyed' as many people as I made it sound out to be previously. I like people to earn my respect but what I said above is the basic principle of culture in an Asian society; atleast in mine.
I think the "diamond test" is useful and elegant in its simplicity: a woman that requires a diamond to marry you is the wrong woman.
The big difference between thirty years ago when I was a teen and now is the growth of organized extra-curricular activities. Children and teens have even fewer opportunities to decide and plan their own course than we used to. And you can't learn what you can't practice.
I didn't downmod you, but a couple potential issues are:

- The job market isn't always a zero-sum game, so immigrants aren't always "stealing" jobs from citizens.

- Illegal immigrants are often in low-paying jobs involving manual labor, jobs that many citizens wouldn't consider even if they were available. (Anecdotally, I know one landscaping company that offers all their jobs to legal immigrants/citizens first, and if no one takes them they go to H-1B visas, and if those run out they start looking at illegal immigrants.)
Awesome read ... I know people don't like to disclose this, but how substantial was your exit compared to your $85k salary prior to that?
When I was 5, my father taught me to program in BASIC on the family's Apple IIe. This kept me entertained through elementary school and into middle school. I remember trying to learn C in junior high, but none of the tutorials I found were all that helpful. None of them ever mentioned what a compiler was or where I could get one, so I was lost as to how to turn source code into an actual runnable program. Junior high math classes led to more problems to play with (and a programmable calculator to use for playing with them). In high school, I took all of the programming classes offered. It wasn't until about then that I decided to go into computer science -- before that, I'd been most interested in biology.
Java's multidimensional arrays aren't stored contiguously in memory because rows can be different lengths. If you have an int[][] a, then a[1] is simply a pointer to an int[]. You can't escape the excess of pointers.

If you try something like having an array for each component as a substitute for an array of structs, then that places fairly strict upper bounds on the length of the arrays before which you are guaranteed to have killed cache locality.
I used to hate computers. Living in the east coast made me want to become a landscape architect so that I could spend more time outside.

When I moved to California I started getting so much sun that I no longer minded sitting at the computer, so I started picking it up. I've always loved designing and building and since a website is never done, the design cycle never ends. Good thing I switched since my thumb was never very green.
Octobot - A Low-Latency, Highly Parallel Distributed Task Queue Worker
This is a great idea, thank you!
Reasons to mobilize your site
An amazingly stupid and entitled attitude is that "Someone did a bunch of hard work, and they deserve to be rewarded". It is pure bullshit. I could go out back and dig a giant hole with a spoon. Should I be paid for the rest of my life for digging this hole? Your idiot reasoning says 'YES! It is hard earned work you deserve royalties!'.

As for your ramblings on identity theft: I think we have a mismatch of definitions. For me Identity Theft is not information copying, it is using that information to cause loss to the person, e.g. withdrawing from that person's savings. The copying of the information is not the theft, it happens all the time without negative consequences. You are defining identity theft as "having the information, whether it is used or not".

You are being intellectually dishonest again here. You use the emotional topic of ID theft, which is a broad term containing several different sub-components, and then redefine it to be isomorphic to copyright infringement. Even when clarifications to what actions and subcomponents of ID theft are actual theft, you insist on ignoring those portions to make some other point. In short, stop being a wanton fool.
Guess where I worked after that? Bear Stearns! rimshot

(but only as a freelancer)

Coming from a state where all the rich people are employed in fields that involve blowing up innocent people with bombs, I rest easy.
Interesting concept. Few thoughts on it:

As Gabriel mentioned in the blog post - "Identify people that would make good mentors, i.e. with the right domain experience." The site looks very generic from outside and forces me to signup without even giving me a peek of kind of people I can expect to see in the community.

I might be looking for a startup mentor in a particular domain, and may be there is none of that type on it right now. Or may be some people on it are providing mentor-ship on how to go about learning a specific skill like flying etc that I am interested in, but since I have no clue, I probably won't sign up.

You can think of highlighting a few profiles or at least a few categories helping a visitor understand whether (s)he should join this community or not.

Good luck, and hope it becomes a good success.
> Gates is manipulative, disregards rules, is ready to lie under oath to further his interests as long as he thinks he can get away with it and shows no sign of remorse...

He also has lots of fans...
When did the second recession start, then?
I have content hosted there too and value the "open access" spirit, but would also like to see Scribd develop a viable business model. An alternative is the service will close down and everything -- both free and archived -- will go away.

Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)
Since there's no way to leave a comment on the original post, Jeff, if you're reading this thread, would you mind explaining what your stripped down version of rails3 offers that Sinatra doesn't?

What does rails do best than Sinatra when you remove ActiveResource, Views, Cookies management, etc…
No framework flamewar intended, just genuine interest.
> involve smoking and drinking and sexually harrassing co-workers

I read it as trusting your employees to behave like adults ... like not to get drunk, and to let them engage in harmless flirting or even dating. A wink is not sexual harassment, a joke about sex (even if a little brutal) is not sexual harassment.

Also, people have their own habits / vices ... if you've got smokers in your company, provide a place were they can smoke. I mean, you've got money for masseuses, can't you find 10 spare square meters with air conditioning?

What's wrong with that?

Instead of having a "fun department", just let people be who they are.
we think we can get 10 million families on it, no problem.

Seriously? No problem? I'd love to know the strategy that makes getting 10 million people to pay $10/month, "no problem". I try not to post negative comments, but I just don't see how anyone can say that with a straight face.
You know, there's a wonderful line from the Gospel of Thomas (one of the Gnostic texts which were originally rejected by the church and then dug out of the desert 60 years ago) in which Jesus' disciples ask him, "What must we do to be saved?" and he answers "Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate."
clickable: https://www.rubypay.com
Sometimes, when reading pieces like this, I think it is time that we as internet users reach a certain point in our understanding of entitlement. There are so many services we readily use, most free of charge, while some of them provide a huge service to us. Some even make us money. But if the service providers themselves try to validate their business by making money out of it in some way, we start bitching...

I do not especially condone what Scribd is doing here, nor can I say I would have anticipated that behaviour (harvesting interesting content and subsequently making the whole service pay-only is not the dumbest thing ever), but if you take a second when you first start using a service and try to think about the fact that they some day will have to make money, you should be able to get some conclusions. What options does the provider of the service have to make money at all? Which of these options would be ok for me? Which would piss me off badly? And how do I avoid being in a trap like the OP?

If one thinks about those questions instead of just feeling entitled to use a service, which might be "free" at the moment, the awakening should not be to abrupt.
It's a good idea. I like the idea that this can get around the high transaction costs per transaction, but the points system is a little confusing. The one line of code thing is cool and should be easy to get publishers to try it.
I was 19 and my sister bought me a computer and I received an AOL CD in the mail. So I got on the net. Then I got a Microsoft VB6 CD. And I learnt to program. I didn't like how difficult the dial-up software was, so I decided to make it easier, and then tried to sell it with Kagi.

Then I got a job taking care of paralysed people in the night, and since I had to stay awake all night in their home (and could not use the net - no flatrates back then), I just fiddled around with Visual Basic all night. So I had a lot of practise, and thought, oh well, I may as well study this computer stuff, seems cool.

So I did.
FORTRAN IV and IBM/360 :)
If you have the ability to modify or create files in /proc you almost certainly already control the system.
I would echo the other comments about the site needing a redesign. When I hit the landing page I had to double check that I went to the right place. It has a similar look and feel as a domain squatter.

But on the positive side, the site definitely has some unique content. Check out this feed and be prepared to laugh (http://ww.com/dilliecam).
Once implemented, how long before the top-rated video is a facially deformed fat man discussing how Hitler had basically the right idea?

There's more pranksters out there than there are people who would take this seriously.
I can't actually believe that they would go the paywall route. It honestly seemed a few months ago when they added HTML5 support that they were going in a really great direction and now I will avoid them like the plague.
Librarians Gone Wild: Violating Netflix Terms of Use
working pretty well for me. I've been using hn reader but I like that this shows the scores. Makes it easier to filter.

Couple things. it appears to be using a non standard input form for comments as none of the typical android auto complete is working. i also tried making a few newlines buts it not showing up in here. also when youre on the comment thread and you hit comment and then flip the screen, it reloads the entire comment thread which is rather annoying on slow connections. otherwise working pretty well. (i stopped manually fixing the things auto omplete normally handles for emphasis. ie 'i' instead of 'I' and youre)

Update from laptop: newlines apparently work but don't show up in the comment box. Auto complete and reloading the comment thread are still issues though.
"readcasting" sounds like an excellent SEO siloing play. Lots of inter-related internal links. Good google-fu.
He couldn't possibly be financially stable. We know Dilbert cartoons cannot attract much audience because they lack attractive faces. Didn't you read the article? ;-)
I have no idea what your rant means or how it relates to the blog post that I wrote. All I can say is that I don't see any evidence that being successful requires shitting on everyone else. What a depressing and negative way to live your life...seems like it would be self-fulfilling. If you treat life like a zero-sum game where you have to step on someone else to get a step ahead, then people will probably not be willing to help you and you'll end up having to do the very thing you thought you had to do to get ahead.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. I know too many people who are very successful who I admire on almost every metric. And if "success" did require shitting on people, it's not for me.
The Tiger Woods Effect
I haven't really asked those questions - its something that was mentioned to me just before I first met her parents. She doesn't know all the details, and I don't feel comfortable bringing it up with her dad at this point.
Did you try contacting them to clarify ? If so, what was their response ?
You seem to think that small talk is harmful. Why?
A dusty old Apple II from my uncle. I was a super-nerd at the time and my parents couldn't afford to buy me a computer. This was around '92? Anyway, it came with a manual for Lisa assembler. It had some built-in graphics subroutines which I thought was pretty neat. I just punched in the stuff not really understanding the implications of it all.

Later we got another second-hand computer, an 80386. It was around '94. For the first time I had a relatively decent computer. That thing lasted me until around '98. I spent summers reading BASIC manuals and copies of Byte and Compute from the library.

I also bought a modem for the thing and started BBS'ing and learning programming from other people. My first email address was through my local BBS which had it's own link. This was my favorite time with computers.

My entire family thought that I would "get into computers."

I never did until I was 23. In high school I had gotten into punk and metal and liked playing in bands. After high school I tried to start a label. I thought I could leverage file-sharing where other labels were trying to shut it down. Well that failed in a big way and I was out of work and living off of coffee and toast in a crappy room in some dumpy part of the city (I had taken off from my small town and moved to the city to put myself through college without any money or a place to stay.. that was tough, but I took audio engineering which turned out to be the wrong thing to do). That's when a friend of mine had a cousin at an ISP who was looking for someone to help maintain their hardware and build websites. I downloaded a few manuals on PHP, read a few tutorials, aced the interview and 5 years on I'm loving my job.

I'm now mainly program in Python and Perl and like to read textbooks on maths and computer science on the weekends. Sort of like I used to when I was a geeky kid that everyone picked on. It took a while, but eventually I got there.
I've been in Toastmasters for three years now. I think it's great for building confidence. Although I still have a lot of room for improvement, I've come a long way already. It will help you become better with prepared speeches, leading, listening, and impromptu speaking. I was president of my club last year, which was a good experience as well. I highly recommend visiting a club or two in your area. Each club has a slightly different feel and you should pick one that you're comfortable with.

Edit: To give some specifics, I used to have awkward and distracting hand gestures. I've learned to control them and I've actually gotten comments that my gestures are good now. Also, I initially tried to fit in too many details into my speeches, and they would always go over the time limit. I've learned to highlight the important points and trim speeches down (that takes work though). Vocal variety is something I'm working on improving at the moment.

Also, if you want to experience presenting under pressure, there are speech contests twice a year which are fun and competitive.
Sad, liked the fact that I could search and not have my search saved for data mining purposes. I think privacy is an important thing. I think giving one company Google all that power is a very dangerous thing. I hope people wake up and start supporting alternative search engines and use Google as a last resort.
I started reading this back when it was new, but quit fairly early on, when the author wrote that pessimists had a much more accurate view of reality than optimists.

I wrote a post in March of last year, Optimism - Dangers and Benefits, http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/optimism-is-not-ne...
>What causes this threat?
This vulnerability is caused by ASP.NET providing Web clients details in error messages when decrypting certain ciphertext. This is known as a "padding oracle" attack.

What? No. It relies on the fact that invalid ciphertexts are not valid, and won't let you do what you're attempting to do. Failing in any way is all that's required.

At least they got this part correct, which I've seen suggested as a fix all over:

>Will switching to Triple DES encryption instead of AES encryption help protect my ASP.NET application?
No. The cryptographic vulnerability being presented involves revealing cryptographic padding errors to a client for algorithms that use PKCS #7 padding. Since Triple DES shares this padding mode with AES, switching to Triple DES will not mitigate this vulnerability.
I think the idea is interesting, I just want to see the UX developed. It's all really rough right now. The y definitely didn't wait to release before it was fully polished ;)

The big thing I see is that it's really hard to figure out what you're supposed to do on the site - or what they even expect you to do.
I agree with the sentiment of not getting caught up second-guessing yourself, but I think that the line of reasoning you're espousing destroys any hope of learning from past mistakes, and by extension, diminishes the importance of carefully considering future decisions. If I don't look back and learn from my mistakes because I never know what would have happened in the other case, why bother putting any thought into my current decisions? Very shortly they'll be in the past and I can avoid regretting them as well :)

I wrote a post about this where I hopefully explain in a little better. Just don't get caught up on the word "regret":

http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/08/why-im-learning-to-love-regr...
Fascinating. The thing I find interesting about this service is that it seems to work seamlessly with multiple queue backends. That would have been really useful at my company, where we completely swapped out our queue server infrastructure. Nice work!
Here's the source code: http://github.com/amir/HNdroid

At the first I thought I'd better clean-up the code, fix some bugs, add features requested here, and add some comments before releasing the code, but I then thought it'd better to release the code as it's in the released build.
Thanks for the suggestion, for now if you'd like to see what a paid link looks like: https://www.rubypay.com/i/9c7wfUo4ACZ
Heh, I know people who are working on breaking reCaptcha. Maybe they should get together and learn from each other.

If you're saying that it's possible to prevent manual, outsourced captcha solving, I would have to strongly disagree. It's similar to the futility of DRM as an antipiracy measure. As long as I can see the captcha, I can
pay someone in another country to solve it for me.

I will agree that it's rare- but the most sophisticated and high-volume spammers do it, and they're the ones you have to worry about.

In case people start giving me sideways glances I want to make it clear that I haven't done any blackhat stuff in a very long time, but I'm still interested in the blackhat community from a security researcher's perspective.
Would you rather work at Twitter (or other fun obsessed office) or 37Signals?
Apple Approves VLC For iPad
That domain's been around a long time, no doubt because someone imagined the Venn diagram of people interested in astrological predictions intersected with people who don't always spell things properly.

Asking people to spell Whereoscope even in the App Store search may also be posing a challenge.

I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but the nomenclature of YC companies is one of the things that still makes them seem a little too easily dismissable.

P.S. Private to H------: PickFly.com is still available...
Works just fine for a blogger that doesn't care too much whether you complete the captcha or not but likes the few extra bucks he makes on a well-commented blog entry.
Wow, yeah, that's pretty bad. I wonder if it's deliberate, or if they simply don't understand the attack...

The funny thing about all this is that the fix is relatively easy: encrypt-then-sign, and validate-then-decrypt. From what I gather, ASP.NET doesn't sign their data (or they decrypt (and fail early) and then validate). Implementing this may or may not break some internal code due to more data, however, so who knows when they'll push a fix.

Though, please, correct me if I'm missing something. IANA crypto expert by any means, but this attack seems conceptually simple enough that most anyone should be able to understand the causes of it if they get away from all the misinformation around it.

edit: clarification: on the validate-then-decrypt, you should be almost entirely safe, as it's bounded by the security of your signature. To make it safer yet, return the same error on a padding failure after validation as on a validation failure, and always do all steps to guard against timing attacks. Otherwise, if they get lucky enough to make a valid data block that passes your signature, they can still see / time padding errors. But that should be astronomically rare, unless you're using MD5.
What the High Jump Tells Us About Innovation
Not so. I'm pretty sure the TSA allows safety razors in carryon luggage. I looked it up on their site a couple months ago. Straight razors are not allowed, naturally.
Thank you all for responding - I really appreciate it.
It was a nice exit, but not one that means we can retire at 27. :)
Re: Muni - Confirmed. I've lived in the Bay area (Oakland, Sunnyvale, San Mateo, Redwood Cit) for 14 years, do not drive, and take public transit 100% of the time. I used to work in Mountain View, and live in Oakland, and so took buses, shuttles, and Bart twice a Day.

In 14 years I've heard of "Muni" but never actually rode on of their train/buses - though, as you mentioned, I _see_ that "Muni" platform every single day when taking Bart.