skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure I follow your argument. The user would provide a plain SHA1 hash (or half of one) as their password (either hex or b64 encoded). How do you plan to get the sentence out of that hash? You have no idea what the underlying sentence is. What am I missing... could you elaborate?

Edit: I think I understand what you are getting at now... what you suggest would require the use of a fully encoded SHA1_Pass generated password (not halves) and the user would have to be using a "sentence + salt" scheme where the sentence always stays the same in order for this to work in real life, right? Also, there are many other ways to use SHA1_Pass where your proposed attack would not work at all. What if they put the salt someplace in the middle? Or used entirely different sentences for different sites? How would you know?
Because Google didn't build it themselves, the about page [1] says it was built by Fi [2].

They outsource quite a lot of work like this, a friend runs a development agency and has a number of projects on the go at the moment for Google.

[1] - http://www.messagesforjapan.com/about/

[2] - http://www.f-i.com/
Further details at http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April....
Motorola outsourced the entire thing to BZ MEdia to make it look like an Android Conference, but in fact it was another Motorola marketing stunt. Reason why Google did not sponsor the conference, lets don't forget that they also have a partnership with Samsung. Motorola this, Motorola that. Samsung was not even mentioned. A complete fiasco.
Its skewed by a certain economic bias..what bias?

You see software units once the first one created has zero cost of duplication as far as producing that next unit to sell to someone..so that economic bias is the assumption that the smart hacker is able to produce a desirable product or service that one can monetize..

Let me give you an example:

The average right now for 2d games on android market is 20k in downloads over 3 months. At $1.99 that works out to about $10,000 net every 3 months from one game. And that is recurring income. Most 2d games take one month to code, thus realistically doing 5 games could net over $100,000 per year after taxes!
1) Right. Harvard is effectively free for families making <$60k/year (http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do)
What can't believe are the comments on that page. Are people really that eager to praise their "overlords" in the name of "better gaming"? But can there really be that many trolls?

The scary part is that these are most likely real people, who like their control and surveillance just fine, and are the majority. Which means we will probably see a completely locked down internet sooner or later.
It sounds like you're not really using Photoshop for all of its features, especially if you're just using it for light image editing. Check out Photoshop Elements for $80.
The comments on this blog entry scare me. Fanboyism and groupthink pushed to the limit.

EDIT: ah well, I see that this opinion is shared. It kind of cheers me up. Kind of.
From geohot's website:

> What if SCEA tries to settle?

> Lets just say, I want the settlement terms to include OtherOS on all PS3s and an apology on the PlayStation blog for ever removing it. It'd be good PR for Sony too, lord knows they could use it. I'm also willing to accept a trade, a legit path to homebrew for knowledge of how to stop new firmwares from being decrypted.

I wonder if any of those terms were met?
It seems to me like the responses are not in order - you probably got a response to someone asking about an Orthodox Christian fast that is going on now.
Hey lem,

I'm nam and I work @ aviary. Can you send an email to nam(at)aviary.com about what you're interested in integrating? We have some new exciting features that you might like (IE compliant + custom skins)
You are right. I guess I needed to put it in writing to realize that these things are not normal. Even for a sales person who should 'always be negotiating'. This guy is out.
Programming tool: The whiteboard marker
Exactly. :) The DB connection is also quite frustrating depending on the location of the DB. MongoDB with MongoHQ or MongoMachine is fine since it's external already. But otherwise you have to know how to configure for example your MySQL PostgreSQL instances to allow incoming connections from external locations, and also becomes potentially insecure depending on your sysadmin skills.

I find Heroku + DJ + HireFire so much simpler, either using that handle_asynchronous method, or just called delay.my_method(*args) is brilliant. No need to think about isolated code or credentials due to the environment variables that are already set on Heroku.

I should look in to integrating Navvy and Resque as well.
This reminds of the PG/FW email chain a couple of weeks ago re: AirBnB. No mention of the things we talk about a lot on HN such as scaling, UI etc... just the potential market for the product. Obviously at that level the discussion is very strategic, but it's where we all should really start.
I read something by Richard Branson that said--and I'm paraphrasing--that everyone is given about the same amount of luck. It's all about what we do with the luck when it falls in our lap.

Fantastic article.
"The harder I work, the luckier I seem to be." - Thomas Edison

From this, I take "hard work" to mean working mindfully, not "counting photographs" as in the article. To work and live mindfully is to do each thing as if you did nothing else: you are fully present in each moment, drinking in your surroundings without judgment or abstraction. A hundred trees are not a hundred trees--each one is a new experience, with different patterns in its bark and different rustling in its leaves. To use the article's example, a party is not a "party". To the "lucky" person, to the mindful person, they are not "at a party"; they are simply talking, laughing, connecting.

I strive for this kind of mindset, and grasp it sometimes. Like zen, the harder you try to hold on to it, the quicker it slips away. At least, I can always look at the trappings of my privileged middle-class life and know that, for these things, I am lucky, and that helps me stay mindful.
I've been working with B2B e-Commerce for about a decade, and it's a pretty sorry field to be sure. Past few years it's come to where I don't really want to recommend anyone any longer, since I know the chances of a good release coming out of it are near zero.

There are probably a fair amount of people here who work with less sexy things, that just don't really talk about it since integration with enterprise resource planners isn't as much fun to hear about as a 12-minute reddit clone getting millions in funding. I know I rarely post.
HTML/ERB to HAML
Typekit Tweaker
ka...wha?! I want my money back! I didnt support him so he can settle?!
Level 3 Communications to buy Global Crossing
Neither profit nor revenue is the number you want.

Revenue = total corporate income.
Profit = revenue minus costs, with costs including compensation.

For the social justice analysis, focusing on "How much money is available for employees and shareholders?", you want revenue minus costs excluding compensation. Costs to buy materials (except in the rare case the company overpays because the vendor is the CEO's brother) are generally fixed and therefore not part of the analysis; overpaid executives are.

For the record, most of the criminality in corporate capitalism is not based on profit but on executive markup. If a company's only crime is making "too much" profit, then the solution is to buy their damn stock. (No, I'm not an HN libertarian. I'm a socialist, but also a realist.)
+1 Choose whichever language you feel comfortable with / can get free books of.
This is quite good - https://browserlab.adobe.com.

I'm sure I've seen other such apps on HN before, but it is a huge problem, so I reckon there's room for improvement.
Meh, PS3 is the last console I'll ever buy. I guess for Sony this is a Pyrrhic victory. What they have done is gone out of their way to prove that no, you don't own that box. You bought a box and we can change the contents.
FP ~ Math/Formal Logics. OOP is a grab bag of theories, ideas and their applications to programming. Unfortunately I don't think that there's a generally accepted formal notion of what OOP actually is. On the other hand, functional languages, while there's some variance, all borrow from the same core principles. Moreover, feature parity in functional languages is a lot more clear in FP than in OOP. Terms such as "pureness" have a well defined meaning.

This is by no means a dogging of OOP. I personally think OOP seems to be better suited for practical business computing. Also FP, tends to have a higher learning curve (ex. monads) such that people of the street and in many academic programs gravitate towards the OOP paradigm. I think this could say something about how natural it is to use OOP, or maybe it just says something about how everybody is taught that programming "should be" (imperative vs functional).
This sounds like a job for WikiLeaks. There needs to be a bat symbol for Julian Assange.
Mike Moritz on Steve Jobs (1983)
Collect more n-grams.
Successful Infographic Marketing Part 1
A multi-part series describing how to use high quality content (infographics) as a highly engaging and efficient way to market online.
This is more about people not knowing how to use advanced search techniques to solve problems than it is about people being reliant on search and their problem-solving skills suffering as a result.
The first time I tried it was slashdotted so I pastebin'd.
Thank you for your work!
Well, FreeBSD would have fit into the spot Linux took up if the legal matters (USL vs BSDi) involved were just a little different.

So I agree with the larger point, which is that something like RepRap (self-replicating, etc.) is interesting. But I'm not convinced that RepRap is that project.
They are 14 year old playstation fanboys, who have a religious devotion to their console brand of choice. This stems from the teenage search for identity. Having made violently strong cases for their favoured console in arguments with their friends at school, they are now ideologically wedded to this position and unable to deviate from it one iota for fear of the inconsistency being seen as weakness, and more importantly, of it undermining their own fragile sense of who they are: a Playstation Fan.

It's basically a microcosm of partisan politics. Don't worry too much about it.

EDIT: Alternatively they could be very lazy astroturfers.

EDIT2: The comparison of console wars to partisan politics has raised another question that I've never considered before: what will happen in a few decades time when the children of people who have themselves been gaming since childhood reach their teen years? Will we see similar patterns to politics, where children tend to inherit their views from their parents without question? Will parents war with their children over their opposing views on gaming?

"This family has played nintendo for four generations! I'll be damned if any son of mine is going to play an xbox 1080 under my roof!"
Would be great if all those users upgraded their browsers to IE9, even if they've already switched to Chrome or Firefox.
http://www.beautyoftheweb.com
Eulogy for Groklaw
Which means absolutely nothing when those quarter million users are back the next day.
Reading this, which I find clear and informative, makes me want to encourage programmers to team up with writers and editors (via Github?) who can clarify and polish the programmers' ideas. It would be a great way to 1) improve the quality of work like this and 2) expose programmers to idiomatic English renderings of their prose, improving their own (English) communication skills and thus increasing their market value.
Vatican Blesses Hackers
They haven't defined anything yet, this is just the first few days, everything is up for adjustment, not getting in YC is driving them, if this works it will have to change to work as you're suggesting.
I posted this in the comments, but I figured I'd post it here to get the conversation going:

You already know that, but just having a github got people interested in me! Showing that I actually care about what I do and wanting to learn more and more.

Giving back is not only a bonus, it's a great incentive in itself that, like you said, you know you've made a difference in someone's life!

And, as for actually promoting yourself, it gets you to meet and communicate with awesome people! That's how I met you in the first place thanks to some rails problem I was having, got to talk with some cool people on twitter and even on IRC.
It's because most engineers stare at the feet of a client when talking to them, and people with money (that don't understand tech) don't like that.

Simple as that.

Tech - Normal liaisons will (hopefully) be a growing market in coming times. I'm being selfish in saying that :)
A private corporation cannot be "fascist", because it has no governance over its populace (customers).

I somewhat disagree, there have definitely been points in history when corporations have exerted control over a populace, although most generally it's workers, not it's customers, through the use of private security like Pinkertons, and through company towns.

However, Apple really doesn't fit that bill. I agree that this is a very awkward metaphor.
Every time you purchase blank cd/dvd media you pay an additional tax that is federally mandated and goes to a private corporation.

"A private copying levy (also known as blank media tax or levy) is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy (additional to any general sales tax) is charged on purchases of recordable media."

I'd say
I see. After playing with this for a bit today (see http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April...) it seems like forward calls, immediate zeroes, 16-bit immediate operands with a zero byte, and doing an OR or an ADD with AL as the source operand are among the enemies to avoid.

It's still kind of magical to me to write a program that does something useful that's only half a line of gibberish when you TYPE it. I just wish there was a better way than PNG to share what it's supposed to look like!
I'm not a fan of the phrase "user friendly."

I've been a UX professional for fifteen years, focusing on the field of usability.

To me, "user friendly" evokes images of Microsoft Bob, software "wizards" that leave no room for user control, and chirpy in-dash car systems that overload the user with icons and friendly messages, instead of just getting the usability right in the first place.

I prefer the term "user subservient."

A good system should be subservient to the user, easy to understand, but ultimately leaving the user in control.

Apple and Microsoft go too far towards "user friendly," and the Linux approach veers too far towards user control without usability.
I think with languages like Haskell, ML, Coq, ACL2 and their ilk, you're not going to get a lot of traction for theorem proving in an OOP-ed C++ variant. The first two do compile to machine code, and have type systems that better lend themselves to theorem proving. I'm not sure if C++ OOP is formal enough (or generally accepted as such) to be a strong contender in theorem proving.
Awesome Sony. Hope you gave it to him good.

Is this for real?

The moment I read the comments I was like, "this is so different from the view people have on HN". Also I am sure these are kids who just swear by their consoles. Sadly they are Sony's biggest chunk of consumers.
One of my favorite quotes is this:

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." -- Seneca
Somebody on one of the blogs mentioned about 5 degrees, make that 3.6 degrees, which is a hundredth of the full circle or 0.06 rad, and since for such values x is approximately tan(x), it would be about 4 billion times 0.06 or 240 million lightyears narrow at our distance.
The Messages for Japan Site I Made Before Google
The national billmonitor mobile report
Smartphone Users Wasting Hundreds Of Dollars Per Year On Unnecessary Contracts
Initially, it was because I felt there was a series of underlying themes in all the startup strategies I hear about.

Then I wondered about using this as a framework for searching out new startup opportunities (see my comment below).

I also wondered if anyone else had already developed cohesive taxonomy like this.
The socialist aesthetic can also be as gentle and humanistic as William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris
Too bad, because he seemed to be winning and he had enough public support to take the fight as far as he wanted. He could have made an example of Sony. They will likely choose someone more vulnerable for their next victim.
Kind of mirrors my comment here on the previous story.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2428622
ep.io has been posted to HN before http://searchyc.com/submissions/ep.io

Is there anything new here? It looks like it's still in beta...
Google Maps / OpenStreetMap mashup: a public toilet finder
Not a chance. Most likely Hotz realized what he was in for if he stuck it out long haul and decided it was worth having a life and a job instead.

It's really unfortunate for everyone that it ended this way.
Google’s misleading security claims to the government raise serious questions
Yea, I would also love to say to my landlord "Hey bro! You know I've been renting this apartment from you for a few years now, and I would like to buy the joint at a prorated discount"
sigh
"Hey George. We're your new corporate overlords, telling you to keep quiet about PS3_CONSTANT_ENCRYPTION_KEY."
"Ok, can we talk?"

"We'll see you in court."
"Shit."

Time passes...

"Hey Sony, here's a ton of money, leave me alone."
"Ok."

I cannot express how disappointed I am in this result.
At first I was taken back by the comments but then I realised that they are the opposing camp. HN readers support Geohot while Playstation.com readers support... Sony. Just 2 sides of the story.
As far as undercutting them, there is

GIMP: http://gimp.org - Gimp is for doing photo editing work. People hate on the gimp for not have 16 bit color support, but this point should be moot for the overwhelming majority of users. I've used GIMP to edit photos, then sold them on iStockphoto where they have been used in advertising.

I've been using gimp for ~10 years and I've never come across something that I can't do with it. (Including the "content aware fill" thing from about a year ago: http://newslily.com/blogs/96). I'm a pretty big GIMP fan.

People also hate on it's interface. If you've grown up on photoshop, sure, but I can work faster in GIMP than I can in anything (including photoshop).

Inkscape: http://inkscape.org/ - I use inkscape every single day for doing advertising materials at my job. I've done ads that have been published in nationally-syndicated magazines with this, and have done work for enormous, internationally-recognized brands with this. Inkscape is a fantastic piece of software.

Scribus: http://scribus.org - Scribus is for doing page layouts. While I don't use it extensively anymore, I have used it for publishing work in the past. It is a fantastic, very complete piece of software that will do everything that you want to do with it.

This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work. The only things you're going to get with Adobe's products is support for their proprietary formats.
Two Facebooks, one for China and one for the rest of the world.
Unlikely.

They probably showed Hotz just how much he was about to get reamed and he folded. Not commenting on the legality or rightness of either side, just the fact that Sony probably has a lot more money and lot more lawyers dedicated to stuff like this.
Considering that the blog post made no mention whatsoever of OtherOS, I would suspect not.

My guess is that the settlement agreement is basically exactly what they said, that he'll stop distributing the code or any future modifications of that code. I'm sure Hotz lawyer came to realize that a protracted battle, even if he would win, would cost far more than Hotz would be able to pay.
2both commenters above - deliver quality content - this is "honest seo". when you start "proper" link building, moving content above header and push it down with css, highlight keywords with [strong] or [em] tags, etc - this is all artificial.

my point is - google became marketer's place, not search engine anymore.. whenever you search for something, you will get stuck into "seo'ed" "brands" with generic names.
Whoever submitted this misinterpreted the results in the headline, but they are interesting nonetheless.

Basically it boils down to this: the average person overwhelmingly sucks at Google searching.
Canadian elections are held whenever an election is called, "every four years" is an American thing that we don't subscribe to.
George Hotz is not telling much either for the moment http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/joining-sony-boyco...
It is absurd that a smart hacker is 30x better than a mediocre hacker. I consider myself slightly above average, and I look at the smartest hackers' code on github, and it is not 30x better at delivering customer value than mine. Maybe 2x at best. Many times the code delivers 1% of the value of my code because it is full of architecture astronat garbage that I am not smart enough to write.
Actually, it's pretty simple: supply and demand.

My experience is that supply and demand only explains/models pricing when you have an efficient market. When there are information asymmetries or actors attempting to impose inefficiencies in a market, supply and demand breaks badly.

To quote one of Joel's best posts:

Software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear.

1. Free. Open source, etc. Not relevant to the current discussion. Nothing to see here. Move along.

2. Cheap. $10 - $1000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce. Most shrinkwrapped consumer and small business software falls into this category.

3. Dear. $75,000 - $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model.

All three methods work fine.

Notice the gap? There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the Ritz Carlton. And with all this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you're sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you're losing money.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

With behaviour like that, supply and demand is absolutely the least important factor in making certain B2B sales. Doubling the supply of "dearly priced" software can't drive the price below $75,000 because it costs $50,000 to make a sale. What's interesting is the opportunity to innovate to make the jump from "dear" to "cheap." That's a business model problem, not a supply problem. In my uninformed and inexpert opinion.
There's lots of cute tools that attempt to cut out a niche at the low end of the difficulty curve - minor editing/creation for web but Photoshop has an incredibly sophisticated engine for handling the complexities and complications of professional colour space and printing work, the investment needed to recreate that code would be millions.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423636
You make a great point about the egocentric nature of a developer.

It reminds me of the saying "Working for youself means you don't have a boss. It means you have customers, which are much less forgiving and demanding than a boss would be."