skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a TA, this book was in very heavy use across departments as a recommended add-on for undergrad classes. (Say you're teaching Roman Civilization. You plan to assign at least 2 papers and probably also some short writing assignments. Recommend the Williams, prod them towards it, and discuss it a little - even if you don't have tons of time in your class to teach writing.)

All great, and I liked the book quite a lot. However, the publisher decided to max out on the book's popularity. First, there were quickly about 4-6 (slightly different) versions of it in print, all at the same time. Second, they would release a new version of the main edition (Style: Toward Clarity and Grace) every year. Once they realized it was a textbook, the price leapt up and up. I suppose it's just supply and demand, but it made it very hard to get students to buy the book (once it went from $10 or $12 to $35), if it was recommended and not required.

tl;dr Buy the 1995 edition for $8.93 on Amazon, not the 10th edition for $35. I'm reasonably confident that the essential advice and meat of the book is the same.
Using client-side storage, today.
I don't think so, but that's not really the point - a brilliant submission that sinks without ever being seen won't have a lot of discussion either.
Not certain why I cannot up vote the published link, but I really liked it. I never enjoyed or like the hackers and painters essay, seemed very empty and I certain could not relate to it any way. Even accounting for confirmation bias, this post was interesting.
I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century.

We're used to electronics getting cheaper as we find ways to make smaller and faster chips. We get change driven by Moore's law.

Getting to orbit is governed by simple lifting against gravity, and that hasn't changed at all. ( It's still 9.8 m/s^2 ) A Falcon rocket looks a lot like a Saturn rocket, so desipite a lot of ideas, a radically different and better design hasn't been commericialised yet.
No it doesn't, there's details about the algorithm here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417
3 Factors for a Successful Startup
I think you mean hashing rather than salting.
Not really; this post doesn't mention salting, which is where my confusion about your point came from.
Better yet, make it cost you 10 karma to submit it in the first place and then the noise on the new page would all be gone.
This doesn't seem all that different from the way car companies run multiple makes. Chevy vs Saturn. Philosophies are totally different (or at least they were) but the market is the same. This way the company does well whichever approach wins out.
Seems that in many cases you get a choice between security over the wire or security in storage, but not both. By this I mean if you use a challenge response authentication algorithm then you often don't have any choice but to store the password in cleartext. Then authentication can be done even over an unencrypted channel without revealing the password.

The compromise seems to be to store the password with a oneway hash then use an encrypted channel such as TLS to send the full password for each authentication. There is still the possibility of intercepting the password at the end of this encrypted channel before the password is compared to the stored hash.

So both models have weaknesses, it just means you have to focus your security efforts into a different area. For the first, it might be somewhere deep in the backend, for the second you'd be paying attention to the front end where you accept the TLS (e.g. https) connection.

This has certainly been the case with for example PPP where you had a choice between PAP (secure storage, but sent in plain text) or CHAP (insecure storage but not sent over the wire in full). Jabber/XMPP servers also traditionally store in plain text but passwords aren't sent for each login. Though it seems that HTTP Digest auth does allow storage of passwords in a hash without transmitting the full password.

Then even with challenge response algorithms if someone is able to monitor a number of authentications then they may be able to gather enough information to pose as that user without actually knowing the password.
I think you're right (hence my confusion about the salting comment)
Can Gmail Be Better?
Mozilla Listed Slow FireFox Addons, Gives a Shame to the Developers
Peerindex is hiring inter/graduate QA developer(s), based out of London Techhub. We use (among other things) Mongo and Hadoop on EC2.

https://gist.github.com/905493
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4070

(the optimistic vs. rollbacks distinction

http://liyang.hu/pub-model.xhtml

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/daqho/is_transa...

FWIW, why .NET can't have it:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4069
Show HN: Webchat with API in just ~60 lines of NodeJS
The slidedecks from two presentations are far more interesting and enlightening than the original post, which instead refers to a new batch of available data.

From DEFCON18, titled "An Observatory for the SSLiverse":
https://www.eff.org/files/DefconSSLiverse.pdf

From the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, titled "Is the SSLiverse a Safe Place?"
https://www.eff.org/files/ccc2010.pdf

The methodology is to nmap all IPs for open port 443s from a tiny three-machine cluster, and if the port is open launch a simple Python client that initiates an SSL handshake but stops before sending its own key. They then dump absolutely everything the server tells them into a MySQL database.

The purpose isn't just to pressure CAs; for me an enlightening and disturbing fact is just how many trusted CA certs there are. They observed 1,482 CA certificates from _651 organisations_ trusted by Windows and Firefox! 651!

There are examples of CAs signing "192.168.1.2" and "localhost", two CA certificates signed with 508-bit RSA keys, etc. Quite interesting.
It's 'Free Software' under the definition of the Free Software Foundation. It's a term that's synomonys with open source
Ex particle-physicist here. Extremely unlikely to be a new force of nature, given the energies that the Tevatron operates at we'd have seen some evidence for this before - and nothing has ever suggested there might be something like this in addition to the fundamental 4. And whilst there might be wild speculation in the press as to what this might be, the research group(s) at Tevatron will certainly know. Given that one of the Tevatron's big hopes was to trump the LHC with a signature for the Higgs it could be something along these things, which would be fantastic. Although it's probably likely to be something more mundane.
Thanks so much. Seems like you can just replace xml with json to get the feed in JSON format. Handy ;)

http://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topgrossingipadapplications/l...
You say you telephone the users.

What if they are traveling? How do you verify the other person on the phone is who they say they are?
There's also a difference between (non-reversible) hashing, with or without salt, and (reversible) encryption.

Additionally, encrypted passwords are only better than plaintext passwords if an adversary that breaks into your database does/can not also get the encryption key. That's unlikely to be the case.
I really don't understand Denmark when it comes to migration issues. They make it so hard to move there for non-EU citizens that it is ridiculous.

As an example, I know of more than one married couple with one Dane and one non-eu citizen that have been forced to live in Sweden instead of in Denmark due to troubles getting residency permits. Not letting a legitimate spouse get at least residency is just crazy.
Worse, GSM encryption is pretty broken, people could be listening in, etc. Phoning people is still sensible in that attackers have to be close to the target, though (or get a wiretap).
Hack Night project: I like my women like I like my...
First, I was working as a consultant to work with organizations who off-shored there sys admin work. As a consultant I found myself having to document something step by step to the India counterparts. Why on earth does this make any sense to hire such people when I could simply do it myself? I've looked at the costs and they could hire one good on-site consultant for the price of 3 bad Indian ones. This is the age old consulting/outsourcing paradigm of "let's just throw more bodies at the problem"

Second, the expensive Indian outsourcing firms are not advantageous to do business with. (1) What's to stop the employee turnover when these people are sent to the US under H-1B visas? Large corporations (in the US for example) often exploit this ability. (2) What then becomes the cost advantage as opposed to near-shoring it?

I think that's why countries such as a Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Argentina, and Brazil are up next as the areas to blossom for outsourcing. These areas foster strong technical skills (and strong educational systems to back them) and are still at a fraction of the price of their "1st world" counterparts.

I can't claim to be an expert on outsourcing economics but I see and breathe the issues and benefits of it everyday.
You should be able to get it cheaper than that—I did. AbeBooks shows it available for $40 or so, plus p&p.
There will always be great articles that no one reads. That's just the way it. The internet is too big for it to be any other way.

The question is rather: how do make sure the average quality of the articles on the front page is as high as possible?

Probably we're quite close to as good as it gets.

One option would be to have a "runner ups"-page ("bubblers"?) which lists the newly submitted articles that are _almost_ on the front page. So instead of two pages (front and new) we would have three (front, bubblers, new).

The algorithm would be simple: the 30 latest articles with more than 1 point that are not yet on the front page.

Hm. This actually sounds like quite a fun little weekend project. Anyone up for it? Is almosthn.com available? :)
>not including setting up a domain it takes about 15 minutes...

Which, coincidentally, is about the same amount of time as you can expect your tumblr page to be up every month ;)
> Microsoft has more or less the same story as Google; one or two wildly successful products supplementing the rest of the business.

Really? I think if you list Microsoft's product lines, only a relatively small proportion failed badly. Sure, Zune never took off and their various on-line efforts haven't exactly had stellar results. Still, it's not like MS only makes money on Windows and Office. They also have a very successful range of server products aimed at businesses. Their initially loss-leading efforts to penetrate the computer game market are now doing pretty well. They even make good keyboards and mice.

Now, here's the kicker. Microsoft do effectively give away a couple of things, notably software development tools and IE. They also run Microsoft Research, which is where a respectable amount of serious work on the future of both programming and HCI is going on today. However, these things are done in a way that supports their overall business interests, which is exactly the sort of strategic decision that good management needs to be getting right.

I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboy, as many of my previous posts will confirm, but I don't think they have been anything like Google or Facebook in terms of hit-to-flop ratio in recent years.
localstorage is all dandy if you have relatively small data requirements (< 5MB). It is a pity Firefox and IE don't/didn't support WebSQL Databases, ostensibly because they didn't like using SQLite. At least Webkit does, which means it is available on mobile.

Hopefully in 15 years, IndexedDB (or its grandchild), which is what Mozilla supports, will have some penetration.
Why hire a consultant?
I'm not getting it - why is addon loading a blocking action in the browser startup process in the first place??

I'm only using Adblock out of those, and i wouldnt mind if adblock was not loaded until a few seconds after I got control. This would highlight very effectively that the addon - and not the browser - is slow. And hopefully get the authors to have something done about it.
shd point out therre's lots of other resources e.g. Graham book, school of Expression, etc (and for all the folks that have been doing scala, ocaml, erlang, F#, some of te concepts will be familiar

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16918/beginners-guide-to-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1012573/how-to-learn-hask...
Make un-deletable files, and encrypted files
Cisco's CEO internal memo leaked
This topic seems to have legs, so I'll recommend another book in this area: Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose[1] (by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner).

They are far more thoughtful about style (what it is and how to teach it) than most writing guides. They acknowledge that there is not one best or ideal style for all occasions and that the style they describe and teach is one among many. It's an eye opening book in many ways. (Note: I see that there's a second edition just out. I haven't read that. I read the original in the late 90s. I doubt they've ruined it, but just in case.)

[1] http://classicprose.com/ with excerpts from the book here: http://classicprose.com/csx.html
The Art Of The Reveal - How To Release an iOS App Correctly
I can't remember who said it, but

"If you can write a compiler, you can write any program."

Hence, I'd get compiler books. Modern Compiler Implementation in Standard ML, SICP has a couple of sections on compilation, there's a computational theory book that I don't have on hand which would be useful to this end too.
> But scratch the surface and you note it may involve creation of temporary file of sorts.

Alright, s/file/document/g in my statement above—a "document" being some chunk of information the user values, and which the program doesn't have any "ownership" of unless the user explicitly delegates said ownership to it.

Think of SELinux: a program would have to request a right to delete the user's files, although it would be perfectly allowed to delete its own files. Except, in this case, instead of the program presenting a security elevation dialog to get permission to delete a document (or do any of an infinite number of other fine-grained things), you'd specify its permissions ahead of time, in the form of a natural-language phrase that is fuzzily-keyed in a HTM memory-base to sub-goals and sibling-goals, each of which eventually reach leaf nodes representing granted permissions.

Also note that, if I specify my goal as viewing a PDF document, I am explicitly telling the computer I that running a script is not something I want to be doing. If I wanted that, I would say I want to interact with a PDF document (or, in more natural-language terms, "fill out a form", of which "interact with a PDF file" would be one of the child nodes.)
Didn't know that. What's better about that way?
Why the average life expectancy for football players is only 55
Is there a particular technique you can describe that brings about that effect?
>How do you verify the other person on the phone is who they say they are?

This came up in another thread some time ago, and it was suggested that one very simple way to do this is to have the person call you back.

Ultimately though there is no real solution to this problem except meeting the person face to face.
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It's just reached the end of it's operating life-time. I beleive the Tevatron exceeded it's original design plans re longevity, performance etc and like any piece of technology it's getting out-dated. It's just not worth running it any more: you're better off funding new. modern infrastructure that has a far broader/deeper research scope.

Fermilab itself is not closing down, just the Tevatron. The lab will continue to operate.
I mistakenly thought Larry Wall was the new Google CEO. It seemed a little odd at first, but then I thought it was very cool. Now it doesn't seem quite as interesting.
This is great!
There is a blog with links and info about this gamechanger!
www.energycatalyzer.blogspot.com
Have you seen the post 3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash."? It's Bash, not Emacs Lisp, but you might still enjoy it.

Post: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529166
I upvoted for you :)
I respectfully disagree. I believe that knowing when and how to say "no" is one of the most important management skills, and I suspect that understanding the need to say "no" a lot more than "yes" in the early days of a project (or a whole business) is quite strongly correlated with success.
Whenever I read about a campaign to stop someone from being deported, I am almost always sympathetic and supportive. But I also can't help but think about the people who are no less deserving of support, but don't have a community with the means/wherewithal to launch such a campaign behind them. Yes, people should work hard to stop Gus from being deported. But if the campaign stops once Gus' situation is resolved the campaign will be a minor victory at best. Gus' situation is a symptom of a disease. It is the disease itself which must be cured
Maeda's response is here: http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/03/11/risds-president-john-ma....

A (somewhat) balanced set of opinions from current RISD students is over here: http://www.golocalprov.com/news/risd-president-comes-under-f....
I happened to be looking at Tony 'Quicksort' Hoare's page at Microsoft Research and I noticed this:

"His research goal was to understand why operating systems were so much more difficult than compilers"

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/thoare/
xss anyone
Yeah... but for 8 variables, there are n choose 2 = n(n-1)/2 = 36 covariates. My spidey sense tells me there is one scatter plot per page.

ggplot vs base & lattice in your experience? I have used lattice before but not in a few years, and I use base all the time. Don't have time to muck around with
That's a great collection of books, but when I see a list of link-shortened URLs to what context dictates are book web pages, I automatically assume they are affiliate links. Please just use the real URLs so people know what they're getting into.

For the record the shortened URLs are not affiliate links, and I'm not trying to make any statement about affiliate links. Here are the original URLs:

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

[3] http://dragonbook.stanford.edu/

[4] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

[5] http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/

[6] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

[7] http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/

[8] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262032937/
And to be fair, you can't really do anything with that password except change your subscription status. That said, version 3 is in the works and I read that "feature" is going away.
lol, yeah, he updated the code to filter out <script> tags and his RegEx is wrong and now won't allow any messages to come through.
There are some cases when storing plaintext passwords is justified, despite all of the risks. There are cases where you can't - or shouldn't - hash passwords.

For Freeversation, we store plaintext passwords for two reasons:

1. Our passwords are group passwords, which (hopefully) aren't re-used anywhere else. If someone hacks our server, the conversations stored on it are incredibly more valuable than the passwords themselves, which aren't associated with a specific email address or account. Our approach to security is that unauthorized access to our server is checkmate. That is the worst case scenario, not stolen passwords.

2. When you create a new conversation, you can invite new users to the discussion. Those users didn't sign up for Freeversation - and in all likelihood never heard of Freeversation before - but they're expected to remember a password that someone else chose. We help them remember that password by including it in every notification email we send. (E.g. emails inviting them to the conversation, emails notifying them of new comments, etc.) We wouldn't be able to do that if we hashed passwords.

In our case, the alternative to plaintext passwords is actually getting rid of passwords altogether and replacing them with secret URLs. We chose plaintext passwords because they provide psychological reassurance that conversations on Freeversation are invite-only, and not public. The irony is that secret URLs are actually more secure than the passwords that most of our users choose. In the future, we may use a combination of the two, so that users both feel protected and are protected in the best way possible.
Redis 2.2.3 released
If you have a public key associated with your email address on a public keyserver, they could encrypt your password—using said key—when you set it, and then store only the encrypted copy. Then, even though they were holding it, the only person who could do anything with it is you :)
> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

I'd say there is usually at least one post per comment page starting with "I know this will be downvoted, but ...". usually with 15+ points...
Net boffins plot password alternatives
Will successful Self-Taught Programmers please stand up?
I'm sure John Carmack and a few other famous programmers are not the only cases of self-taught programmers that have been successful (whatever the degree). Please tell us how it is being a self-taught programmer. Do you have a startup? Do you work for Google / Facebook / Apple / ...? Do you work on your own, or in someone else's company, and are as successful and acknowledgeable than your CS colleagues?

Please tell us your story.
For more correctness, scala has had interop hiccups

http://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/2991

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3313929/how-do-i-disambig...

(and does Orig. Commenter have examples of clojure hiccups? Interop is very important to both (and F#). Maybe a more meaningful compare/contrast is haskell, scala and F# (which I can't do)

http://matt.might.net/articles/best-programming-languages/

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

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html

(his league table of "Most Powerful Type Systems": Agda, epigram, scala, haskell
Ah, but you see, for some reason we are terribly afraid of pro forma marriages being used for residency as well as marriage being used for [Family reunification]{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_reunification}
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Remember twitch.me (node.js realtime chat)?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840914

Chat.io, new HTML5 / Node.JS-powered social group, launches
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2343840

Show HN: Node.js console chat
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391389

The node.js chat server that was posted earlier
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980838

Show HN: Meet the new Ajax IM (with Node.js)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127654

NodeChat
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866401

Ragechat:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889883

Using node.js, <blah blah>, to make a real time chat app
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2306423

Chat system with WebSocket and node.js
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1020577

Hey man, doing anything constructive with your free time is a rare and admirable trait. But really, another Node.js chat application? Really?