skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this view matches reality. For example, imagine that I fork and modify some GPL'ed software and only distribute it within my company (or just use it myself). I'm not required to distribute source to anyone other than the users of my modified program, so (to use your term) I have "enslaved" my version of the software. I think it's clear that "free software" refers to the freedom of the users of that software.

(disclaimer: I am not an advocate of the "free software" moniker/agenda although I happily use and contribute to open source software and don't object to judicious use of the GPL.)
That kind of "transparency" would likely require US ISPs to reduce advertised speeds 10x overnight, enraging millions of customers.
+1

Staging environment must be IDENTICAL to production or ridiculous and disastrous errors will occur when you least expect them.
Patrick's reference to "capacity problems" was in regards to deciding whether to clear memcached. In a large scale deployment, such as Facebook, clearing the caches could overwhelm the servers. Patrick is small-scale enough to not worry about that, and prefers clearing the cache to avoid stale-cache-related bugs.

I do agree regarding how nice it is to use Heroku. My only issue with them is that they only support Ruby and Node.js, so I need to take my Clojure applications elsewhere.
I like the new page better than the front page- sure there's some crap but there is tons of great stuff there.
That's kind of liking saying quinces are preferable to hoop skirts.

HMAC is a construction that takes a hash (like SHA1), data, and a secret key (like "ff79f2fbe108a68c34a66004058fcfdb988dbc43") and applies the hash twice, each with a special tweak, to create a digest that only someone who knows the key can recreate from the same data. It's how two parties who share a key can prove to each other that their messages haven't been tampered with.

Hash+salt is a construction that takes a hash (like SHA1), a password (like "gobears") and a random public value (like "$4jdle$") and creates a password hash out of it that can't be precomputed.

People do (ab)use HMAC as a password hash. Those people should know that HMAC is as easy to precompute as naked SHA1 is; you can "rainbow-table" HMAC. People who have misunderstood HMAC tend to stick up for it by saying "yeah, but people will have to find my secret key first", to which a response that ends that silly argument is "once they get your key, they can attack all your hashes in parallel and that's bad".

All of these schemes are demonstrably inferior to any adaptive hashing scheme, like bcrypt or scrypt or PBKDF2, all of which can be tuned so that a single password attempt takes 500ms (or any other time); they in effect require password crackers to complete a "proof of work" that can't be sped up without a breakthrough in cryptanalysis.
Contrary to some hacker's claim, the Unix standard hash function crypt(3) has been crackable since at least 1990. It is salted, by the way.
I am aware of all internet traditions
Agreed.

As "combat methods" require more intelligence, it will become harder for governments to control the population.

Convincing an army of hackers to follow a military order without questioning it is much harder than convincing some kids it's cool and patriotic to run towards a front line with a gun in their hands.

Flags and national anthems will lose much of their political importance.
Hmmm, I'd assumed it was a source-to-source compiler. Are they thinking of writing a JVM in JavaScript? Can you say slow? And debugging seems like a nightmare. And if it's not that, then how else does it get into the browser?
Twilio uses Asterisk? Is this true? If so my respect for both their technical chops and pain tolerance went up...
Oracle/sun don't want competitors forking their code and
making proprietary. That's why Sun chose GPL.

That's the biggest bullshit I ever heard.

And no, you can't make 3rd party implementations based on OpenJDK: the European Commission, when investigating the issue of MySQL being sold to Oracle, concluded that derivate works from GPL v2 licensed code are not protected from patents.

That's because the "implicit" patents grant in GPL version 2, while it may hold in the US, it wasn't properly tested in court, and it is too weak for the European Union.

Actually this loophole is the "raison d'etre" for GPL ver.3 (the other issues, like tivoization, appeared later). If SUN would have chosen the Apache License or GPL ver 3 (which was already available at that time) this wouldn't have been an issue.

Thank you for proving my point ;)
Ask HN: What "Hello World" is for programmers, _____ is for designers
Working on startups (and any webapp), the general advice says that if you are a designer, you should have at least the basics of programming so you have some understanding of what they are expecting and vice versa.

As a designer, it is pretty easy to find a "Rails 101" with a "Hello World" and learn the basics in a few days. In my case, I'm a programmer and want to know the basics of design. What would be the best approach? Most of the tutorials I see about design, seem to consider that you know the basics.

So, basically, I want the "Hello World" of web design. Where is it?
This is bad economics. The price of everything does not trend towards $0. Specifically, goods that require a high labor input do not get cheaper over time unless they can be substituted with technology. Wages rise over time, so anything requiring a certain amount of labor will get more expensive.

A good example is personal servants. In 1910 a middle class family in England would be able to afford several full-time servants. Nowadays it's far more expensive, because the ratio between middle-class wages and minimum wages is much higher.

A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment. But the cost of providing a given teacher-to-student ratio will go up over time.
Adding on:

We've also had a housing crisis which is keeping many people chained to their current regions due to underwater mortgages and no housing sales. 5 years ago people could move their families across country for a good job. Even if they want to now, they can't. This is just not acknowledged by most companies.

I was approached a couple years ago by a company that was starting up - 'ex google founders' and all that. The product/service was pitched to me as a collaboration/communication tool to help remote teams work more effectively. Sounded great, but I was not allowed to work remote. I had to upsticks and move to SF. To work on a remote collaboration tool. WTF?
Glad to see something like this. As formulated, I'm not sure how it's better than a calendar. I still need to be in a browser to enter a goal, so entry doesn't seem any easier. The reminders are random, but I'm not sure how random is any better than picking a random date for the calendar item.

While I walk to work I'm thinking about how I could be better at communicating with myself "fourth-dimensionally" (think Back to the Future Part 3). It takes 25 minutes, so I have plenty of time to come up with all sorts of goals for the day. It's these goals that I want to get reminded of when I can do something about them. What's the easiest way to capture a thought while on the move (walking to work, hiking, driving your car), and have that thought get communicated back to you when it would be most useful as motivation?

Found a typo:
"Who will call me for the weekly phone review?
If you sign up for the Buddha plan, Mr. Goal will call you every week to go over your goals with you. What not a better way to keep you on top of your goals."
Ah, yes. I spent five or ten minutes this year examining a washing machine problem my wife reported. The problem: her husband had turned off the hot water feed while he tightened the connection, then had failed to run it back on. I believe she forgave him his negligence ...
This is probably the clearest explanation of the distinction that I've read so far; thank you.
I agree with you and generally this is a great way for a startup to save money as well because new grads are cheap.

The problem that you'll then have though, is that when you encounter a tough technical challenge, you won't have the benefit of having someone on your team who has seen it before.

So there must be some golden ratio. A solid emphasis on college recruiting to serve immediate needs, with a focus on building out a technical knowledge base accompanied by many years of experience.
More information about the vulnerability (which was fixed over a year ago) can be found here:

http://www.exim.org/lurker/message/20101210.164935.385e04d0....
At least with }, ], and ) you know any given } matches a { and not a ( or a [. Whereas with all )'s, it's a lot harder (for me) to know which ( in a mountain of ('s it's going to match.

I have found the opposite. It's a lot easier to close with a bunch of )))s at the end of a line than to flip around with the )]}]))} line noise. I let my code's structure give me meaning. I am less concerned with matching things and more concerned with readable code arrangement. It is easier for me to read English-like words than a bunch of symbols. As a result, the ))s are almost equivalent whitespace with the exception that they provide useful and common structure.
qmail may have had weird license quirks and may not be as featureful as modern MTAs, but the code is very nicely designed. qmail did not achieve "commerical success", but that was due to the learning curve rather than its approach to not having remote root holes.

I used it for many years until I got lazy and switched to exim and then postfix. I guess I am glad that I switched to postfix, but not so glad that I switched away from qmail.

(Ironically, I still use sendmail on my OpenBSD boxes. It sure seems funny to be relieved that I'm running sendmail today!)
Um... I disagree. I worked for a large company that does just that: hire liberal arts majors with high gpas and teach them to program. It works, well, horribly. Ask any former employee about the code quality at epic systems.
S-exprs == macros
How many startups really need rockstar ninjas? I mean really need them? As in the business will succeed if you have them and fail if you don't. I bet that number is actually very small.

But everyone thinks they're the special case.
Not really, the writing is about the same. YuGiOh, Bakugon, and other anime series made after the games they promote are actually a cheaply made long drawn out commercials, as originally designed. Chaotica, Pokemon and Digimon are a bit better, but not by much. Fairly Odd Parents, Spongebob, Ben 10, Avatar, An Air Pirates show and something with a boy with scientist twin sisters and others are on par or better with 90s shows.
I work for a large company that hires programmers with many years of experience at prestigious firms and it works, well, horribly. It turns out that not very many people are cut out for programming.

So honestly, I don't think your approach is too bad.
Just a few fun experiences I had with vps.net:

* A server reset itself to a 3 month old backup overnight, their support was unable to explain it.

* Random disk I/O issues bringing throughput to < 1 MB/sec

* My favorite: Some internal routing issue on their end would randomly route my ssh attempts to another machine on their network. Their solution? Grant me access to this machine which was rented by another customer!

Oh and of course, there was plenty of downtime thrown in for good measure.

That being said: I really like their offering in theory, I just wish they could pull it off in practice.
This.

All these bloody people play armchair economists with macroecon, which is genuinely difficult, but refuse to do the same with micro:

If you can't hire people at a given wage, raise the wage. Or whine online about the lack of employees.
Gilad Bracha: Reflecting on Functional Prpgramming
I started out writing about how I thought this was insane and by the end of it I had changed my mind and - suspending disbelief and assuming they can pull this off in a reasonable and performant manner - it's actually a pretty clever idea.

Now that Apple, Google and Microsoft have all put the nail in the coffin of applets by not supporting them on their mobile devices Java is looking decidedly shaky as a client side browser technology - especially when you consider that Flash IS shipping to most devices. However Oracle can actually one-up Flash here if they can promise to run inside the browser on any platform. Not too long ago it would have been impossible, but with things like Canvas, WebWorkers and WebSockets they can probably make a reasonable stab at implementing at least the functions of a standard Applet with Javascript.
Actually, the price of good engineers being high + high unemployment speaks precisely to a misalignment of supply/demand.
If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with English degrees and teach them programming

Body shop consulting firms like Accenture have done this for decades.
Beauty in Proof
> Umm...are there any reasons, other than the JVM, to use Java? I'd much rather write plain old JS (or even better, CoffeeScript) than Java any day.

Existing code. I agree that writing JavaScript is better in almost all cases, but there is a lot of existing code out there and not just in Java but C, C++, and other languages. Being able to run that on the web, anywhere, would be huge.
Epic Systems eh? I heard they were a great place to work?
Good.

...

Some day, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to explain cellular respiration to me.
That's fine, but not all of us are 20 anymore. Some people -- including some very experienced devs! -- want to do boring shit like not be broke, have savings, have a 401K, take vacations, etc. Even if they live in NYC.
No doubt, but by only paying wages that appeal to 20somethings who want to live with a roommate in a cramped apartment, you're missing out on a much larger talent pool. Supposedly the same talent pool with the experience and skills you claim you need.
To a very close approximation ISP customers do not fully use their bandwidth. It seems silly to change pricing structures to cater to a tiny minority (less than 1%).

More transparency in regard to caps and utilization would be good, but I don't think metered billing would be the end of the world (provided that it generally approximated what people are paying today).
I think evolutionary humility is a great thing to be reminded of, thank you Palomides.

What's interesting to me is, an organism wouldn't have to out-compete the majority of already existing natural organisms to end the world, it "only" need replace the base of the ocean ecosystem. If a new form of bacteria killed all of the krill and plankton it would surely have grave consequences.
I think whether it's a big deal or not depends on the limits. In New Zealand I only get 30GB/month for $60, and that is quite annoying.
Or powerdns: http://www.powerdns.com/content/open-source-community.aspx
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 127
Observium: network management and monitoring
Interesting contrast between this and the stories about teams at Google gathering data on optimal line widths or hues of blue...
True, it could have. But it didn't until the organizational and persuasive ability of a small group of people could out-do the FBI, CIA, etc..

That being said, there is a lot more behind 9/11, and increasing power of individuals relative to super-powers is just one factor.
Let's see....bad weather, high rent, high cost of living, lots of wall street jackasses, too many damn tourists, and plenty of terrorist threats. And we haven't even started talking about silicon valley's tech culture and close proximity to Asia.
Yes,

Though one should also look at the number and sophistication of the people a company deals-with, the amount of leverage it uses and so-forth. But this kind of analysis isn't really new. It is what central banks are supposed to do. The Fed's job was "to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McChesney_Martin,_Jr.). Unfortunately, the Fed joined party itself with the repeal of the Glass-Steagel act and we've had stimulus-through-speculation over the last twenty years.
The rise of speculative excess has a societal and psychological dynamic and once it gets going it is sustained by the social power achieved by the speculators. The pattern is old and has ended in grief a number of earlier times in history.

I would recommend http://prudentbear.com/ and Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin. This gives an intelligent analysis of the last twenty years' speculative excesses.

Also, before tossing out knee-jerk anti-regulation comments, consider how well Alan Greenspan used this sort of ideology as "covering fire" for the speculator economy. I'm neutral on whether a libertarian system could be built soundly from the ground up. But I think it's crucial to note how the use of a bit libertarian rhetoric to dodge regulations when convenient has been instrumental in leading us to the unsound ground we are currently on. (I would admit that Ron Paul's critiques Greenspan's policy actually have been quite good over the years).
This has appeared at least twice in the last two days.
How is this generally done? Do they add JS to every UI element to log what the user does and send this info with the requests, or they can find that out only from the http server logs?
People may also retain full cells from their mothers (or in extreme chimeral cases, 'vanished twins') through their whole life:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/health/10bloo.html?_r=1...

From the article:

Another route to chimerism is through the cells that routinely pass from a mother to fetus and remain there for life.

Dr. Ann Reed, chairwoman of rheumatology research at the Mayo Clinic, who uses sensitive DNA tests to look for chimerism, finds that about 50 to 70 percent of healthy people are chimeras. The more scientists look for chimerism, the more they find it. It seemed not to exist in the past, she said, because no one was explicitly looking for small amounts of foreign cells in people's bodies.

Further, experiments in mice show that stem cells from a fetus can take up residence in the mother's body, possibly indefinitely and granting benefits:

http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/002393/index.html

Taken all together, these results suggests a woman might have persistent chimeric cells from any or all of the following, if including all remote possibilities:

• her own mother

• a 'vanished twin'

• a grandmother or earlier matrilineal ancestor (if those cells persisted in the mother and then also transfered to the fetus)

• older siblings (if those cells persisted in the common mother and then also transferred to the later fetus)

• her own children

• and of course, any donors from which the woman receives blood or tissue during a medical procedure
But if you whine loud enough, you can open more visas for cheap labor to come in next year.

I'm totally not against people coming in to the country - legally. One of my first tech jobs was at a company that sponsored a number of Polish and Czech engineers. They were all effectively captive - they were paid a barely livable wage (relative to US-born people doing the same job) but couldn't easily go out and take another job due to immigration status. But that meant the company 'saved' so much, and could use it to help keep other wages in line - 'you're already paid $x more than person Y!' sort of thing.
Holy page views, Batman!

Screenshot from Quantcast showing 409M page views, 31.4M visitors a month in aggregate for all Gawker Media properties

"My job was to write twelve posts a day about 'media gossip,' which meant anything unpleasant or otherwise intriguing about anyone who had power in any Manhattan culture industry. There had to be enough posts so that whoever was sitting at my old desk at the publishing house, and everyone in Manhattan like her, could read something new when boredom struck."

Excerpt from book by Emily Gould, ex-Gawker, infamous blogger
Most startup jobs in NYC pay over $100K if you're an engineer. If you have a family and need a bigger place you can always live in New Jersey. "Money" is not really a problem in New York City. If you're smart and hustle in NYC, you can always make more money. You will probably have to do something heinous to get it, but it's sitting there, waiting for you.

That said, many hackers just aren't into the sort of startup projects that get funded and pay well in NYC. That's a bigger factor in the "talent shortage." The startups there just aren't that cool. If someone in Brooklyn started a company making life-sized Gundam robots you could control with your web browser, everyone would quit working at whatever foodie-blog-ad-network they're currently stuck at and work at the robot place for half their previous salary.

It's hard to do outsourced work in an early stage startup because stuff changes so frequently. The last startup I worked for in NYC actually did have a half dozen outsourced employees in places like Oregon and Hawaii and all but one of them quit because they were so frustrated about changing priorities and miscommunication.
You make it sound like they were incompetent, lazy or evil. Or perhaps I misunderstood you, sorry if so.

But the fact is, they did think a lot about using other languages on the web, and about proper ILs as well. The fact is, there has been no good way to do either, if you want a standards-based platform with multiple compatible implementations.

You can take some existing IL like Java bytecode, but (1) that stuff is patented, and (2) there is no hope of cross-vendor agreement on what that IL should be, and all of them have various issues anyhow (for example, Java and .NET bytecode were designed with static languages in mind).

JavaScript is winning simply because it's there, it works, and everybody supports it. Yes, it has frustrating limitations, but it's hard to see a practical alternative. We will simply need to overcome those limitations - and that is possible.
Very interesting. I've always been interested in virtual currencies (and virtual countries, anyone remembe freedonia?) but as the author mentions they've mostly fallen prey to money launderers. I think it's an interesting experiment to limit the money supply, it gives you an incentive to get involved _right now_. I'll be trying it out, anyone else?
Businesses fail to get traction for product reasons, business fail to grow/thrive because the mis-managed complexity makes changing the system too expensive. Ex: well, i'd love to build you that feature, but then i'd have to change x, y and z and there are no tests for y or z because we thought it would unnecessarily slow us down.. so it will take 3 months instead of the 3 weeks that hotshot rails dev you just hired said it should.
My counter guess: expect small and medium non-governmental cooperative organizations to invade.

Currently the world is divided into those creatively make social structures happen (gee Bob, let's start a company -- who should we hire? gee George and Thomas, lets start our damn government on this side of the Atlantic -- how does one train an army anyway?) and those who subconciously seek to occupy them un-creatively (gee, should I become an Oracle dev or a Microsoft dev? Gee, should I join the revolutionary army or the royalist army?)

But the technology (DIY manufacturing) and the communication (internet plus math) and the culturation for everybody to become a little bit of the former is starting to seep everywhere, and there are huge payoffs for taking it up and organizing cooperatively(gee, why dont' we start GNU software and give it away instead of try to sell it?)

Oh -- just want to mention that I don't see this as being nation state driven, and it is not the big monolithic socialism of the past -- more a "free market socialism"