skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree this law doesn't seem to outlaw hashed passwords, it simply means that you need to store 2 copies of the password - one hashed, and one in plain text.

It's totally legal to store the hashed value with your live database as normal to provide authentication, and store the plain text version in a write only file on a separate system to try and give some additional level of security. This isn't a great solution, but it does provide hashed passwords for regular work, and plain text for when the police ask for it.

It's obviously a pretty stupid law, but to say it "outlaws" hashed passwords is just nonsense.
Talk to the guys at Conjunctured coworking (http://http://conjunctured.com/). They're well connected with the Austin startup scene.

In particular, Cesar Torres (@cesart on Twitter) is a great guy to talk to.
One of the benefits of being in the EU is that there is a higher authority than the government who can overturn stuff like that. I'm not a legal expert, but seeing as how the latest constitutionnal questions in France went, I'm pretty sure this decree will not stand.
> I use node.js for batch processing: it's just fantastic. Instead of ugly bash scripts that are absolutely unreadable and therefore unmaintainable

I am confused: if you don't like bash scripts why in science's sake did you keep using them instead of one of the billion alternatives out there?

> This is an area where node.js really shines and that is not often mentioned.

Because it's nonsensical. What makes node.js "shine" more at batch processing more than every other language on the planet?
The basic question is, does the law require giving authorities the password verbatim, or rather, giving them access to account's data (perhaps including fake authentication as the user, but without use of user's password)? There may well be mis-understanding in the early reporting.

If password verbatim is required, well, game over, the law will be shot down in record time. If, on the other hand, merely access to the account is required, that's just a small feature to be implemented -- ``allow accounts of authorities authenticating as any plain user without users' passwords'' (which is still terribly bad, open to abuse etc.).

In any case, the law (as reported in the article) sounds like a failure of democracy to me -- not something one wants his representative to vote for.
How can it be competition if there is no competition? I'd rather call it the expectation of upcoming competition. Or the fear of future contenders; but isn't that universal? Whatever innovative product we craft, whatever niché we delve into, there's always the danger that competition will come.
> Sharing code between server and client (browser) is much easier, and there is no alternative to javascript in the browser.

That's a fallacy, the environments have nothing in common, the coding styles and interactions don't either, the only things you're going to be able to meaningfully share are trivial helper libraries à la underscore..

> and writing server code in the same language simplifies things.

Why? How? Where? I see that assertion often, but I have yet to see it backed by anything but "because I said so".
Tech bloggers: stop pushing errors just for the hits [video]
What is Cross Site Scripting?
While somewhat less frequent than past, XSS or cross site scripting remains to be the most widespread publicly reported web vulnerability and also a threat to Internet surfers. Through cross-site scripting, your information is stolen from the browser
You might enjoy this deep zoom video: http://vimeo.com/1908224
Yeah, before clicking I was wondering which KDF they've made mandatory, PBKDF2 or bcrypt.
want to consider the most generic case? Don't mention Redis as it is not a KV store from the point of view of the mathematical model proposed inside the article.
Because that's what gives us an edge to compete with Gmail.

We can be faster than gmail.com because we're a desktop app. Trying to compete with gmail.com as a webmail would be way harder.
But that's just another government. What makes Brussels more likely to get it right than Paris?
> What makes node.js "shine" more at batch processing more than every other language on the planet?

Because every other language on the planet is not Javascript...?

- - -

Edit: maybe I should clarify? The only other solution (that I know of) to write Javascript for the server is Helma; I've tried it and it kind of works but it's very clumsy. Is there another simple way to write JS on a Linux box?

- - -

Edit2: maybe I should not clarify.
According to other sources, you have to pay a fine of 3850 Euros for every time you don't comply to a request. That amount is low enough that the cost/benefit of giving out the passwords is not evidently on the side of complying with the decree. I'm not sure how many companies will rather pay than give out the data.
It strongly depends on the wording of the law and on the usual million things that affects how laws are interpreted. Maybe just providing a freshly generated password that gives access to the account in question is enough to satisfy this law?
He looks like a scam to me.
Of course the question arises: who will overturn the "overturner"?
How would you implement that? The law requires you be able to give police the user's password, upon request. How would you do that without storing the password in plaintext, somewhere?

The law seems ill-conceived at best. In the best case, it will require every french site to implement a workaround. I'd be willing to bet a great many will simply comply with the law and compromise everyone's security.
> but any sufficiently complex JS app tends towards callback spaghetti

Callback spaghetti is quite easy to avoid.

> and maybe I have been doing something wrong

If you have callback spaghetti, regardless of the complexity of the app, you are most likely doing something wrong.

> I don't see it as a huge leap forward from what can be done with Twisted + Python, or Go

Of course not, but it's not hard to imagine that Node.js will have the biggest ecosystem in this space and with it comes advantages (and perhaps disadvantages).
I'm not sure what basis the EU would have to strike this down though?
Gnome Slackbuild 3.0 has been available for slack 64 for a while, and the stable release hit the mirrors recently. See http://gnomeslackbuild.org/
Change OSX Terminal theme on the fly when you SSH
Couldn't you, in theory, keep hashed passwords, but in case of a request comply by saying:
"Ok, we will give you the passwords, but our passwords recovery process will take over X years while we brute force it" ?
I'm sure MSDeploy is nice when it works. Serious emphasis on "when it works". I spent an entire evening trying to get MSDeploy to push something from my local machine to my VPS. Conditions: The VPS is remote and not a member of my home-domain, but the path between them is 100% whitelisted in all intermediate firewalls.

How hard can that be?

Evidently very hard. Despite spending the entire evening trying to get them to communicate and push files, it simply didn't happen. In the end I ended up writing my own deployment-system based on source-control, Samba and rsync in Bash. It was easier, it worked and I know why it works.

If that is easier to get working than a "one click" solution, the authors of said solution better get a bigger button. I can't seem to click this one.
I can also see some disadvantages to ceding your sovereignty to a not-entirely-democratic supranational bureaucracy.

Hopefully it all works out for Europe but I hope to God my country never goes down that route.
I briefly considered building it over an afternoon, but I'm not sure it would really work on the Internet.

My gut feeling is that within a few days it would be full of spam and inane comments, because there's absolutely no sense of having a shared responsibility for a physical place in your neighbourhood. It's also unlikely to build the same sense of community from people stopping at the same time and talking to each other.
I wander if companies like google will soon start offering services where you can choose what countries they store your data in.
http://gstek.info/forum/index.php?topic=1209.0
I'm not sure what you are replying to as it's been redacted, but just wanted to say that there's really nothing wrong with that technique. Developers tend to way overestimate the cost of a long polling request with minimal headers.

Also the speed benefit of websockets over long polling is so trivial that it doesn't really matter.
> We weren't taught the alphabet until the age of about 6-7 and basic arithmetic at 7-8.

Is that strange? I started school (a "regular" one) at 7 (as is customary in Sweden) and I didn't know the entire alphabet or basic arithmetic then. None of my classmates did.
In short, the EU is deeply boring. This means its various machinations are covered less by the various national newspapers, leaving them to make decisions in peace.

When I say "covered less" I mean in the hysterical, think-of-the-children way that national politics tends to be reported. It is still obviously covered.
Ask HN: When will the first HN account appear on eBay?
In the times of World of Warcraft, virtual power positions quickly appeared on eBay and high point user accounts reached up to $2K.

Hacker News has its own karma based system, which gives high karma users a power to create destinies of stories and also users.

Since first page HN listing with an interesting title can generate 2000+ UQ visits in 6 hours to a specific target group, this definitely has some commercial value.

We've seen bots that automatically submit influencer blog posts to HN to gain karma. There are some Chinese farmers on HN which are building their karma to impress pg for YC submissions.

When will the first HN account appear on eBay? Or will it be single upvotes sold to generate long term income for farmers? Do you think this is already happening undercover?
Are you from China by chance?
Teaching a cow to jump
So this really hurts French hosting companies more than anything if it eventuates.
Should happen soon because people are attracted to power by nature. Let's wait and see what kind of valuation one HN karma point gets.
The economics of discrimination
I can't test this now, but I remember trying it many times in Firefox, and every time I'd get a little icon that showed a little broken image. It was only after the Firefox 4 upgrade, that it started working (well in gmail's case, kind of working).

Having looked into what gets sent, it is definitely a Firefox thing, but for me, it only started doing it with 4.0, so hence this post.
Is that 3850 euros per password?
Treatment for acid reflux disease
1) one thing is communication, one thing is math. For communication we need to write in the project home page that Redis is a key-value store, as people see this outer shell when they still don't know the project. But it is easy to realize that inside every of the supported values types lives another, nested, data model.

2) I'm not making any assumption on the importance of Redis. The fact is, the article mentions it, then draws conclusions not applicable to Redis.

3) I don't see how I move the goal lines, please if you have any kind of intellectual honor, let's discuss why exactly my statement is not true: Redis was listed in the article, than a pure key-value model (a map between a constant value and another constant value) is analyzed, even if Redis does not fit.

Moreover the article has no real point as even with a simple model like the key value one I can model any complex data model (I can use every key-val pair as a node for a B-Tree and build an SQL DB on top of that), what this means, that all the databases are equivalent? It is clear to most people that the new databases are mainly a new set of compromises between consistency, complexity of operations, implementation tradeoffs. The fact that mathematically is the same is no sense.

Are all the turing-complete languages the same?

Edit: I see you created your account 9 hours ago. In Sicily you fit perfectly in a category called "cowards".
I'm really loving Yeti. It's not very mature but it's a very promising language.

It does need more libraries but it's also extremely interoperable with Java/JVM. Very simple and easy to call out to Java libraries. Also compiles to native JVM classes (can be called easily from Java).

For anyone interested, I managed to write a Mustache implementation last weekend:

https://bitbucket.org/puffnfresh/yetis-mustache/src
French politics simply does not understand the internet. And they are uninterested in privacy or security. They "lost it" in my eyes with their LOPPSI internet filtering laws (which they heavily promoted with nonsense about child sex offenders) [1]

This law (in general) is going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country#...
YouTube's New Search Options Format
Talk to the people for whom you think this will solve a problem

If you don't know who those people are or how to find them then it doesn't matter whether or not you implement your idea. I know that this isn't always easy, but finding your target market and communicating with them before you write a line of code is extremely valuable. For certain niches this can be accomplished by posting on forums, other times it involves physically visiting a place.
Twitter Now a Source for Bernie Madoff-ish Investment Returns
The beauty and humanity of another person's dreams inspire me.
This just looks like a great way to make your back-end depend on your front-end. AJAX calls are usually best served in an API like manner (here's some data, do what you like). This lets you iterate on the client without messing with the server, which this would destroy. If you have an application style client, you're also probably making the same data requests for different purposes.

Granted it's quite neat, but it seems like a bad idea. I think too many libraries recently are focusing on length of code to the detriment of good principles and clarity.
I'm using Google Apps and haven't noticed any slow down. Still happy as Larry.
The Alternative Vote (Instant Runoff) Explained « Grey's Blog
Really interesting.

When I arrived at the site I had no idea what it was for. After reading the first and second pages I _still_ had no idea what it was for... but for some reason I didn't care. I began to form this idea in my head that 'nations' referred to 'eco systems' and that this site was a fully integrated Internet presence for a startup. E.g. an easy way to have a Web site, forums, integrate social networking into everything and have it all beautiful at the same time.

It was only once I read the HN comments that I realised it was for a more political market. It just amused me that looking down that sidebar I made pretty much everything in my head apply to startups... "co-ordinate volunteers? are they talking about open source projects?" ;-)

Anyway, those are just my initial thoughts. A very interesting vertical you've _actually_ aimed for.
Inertia is a very, very subtle concept. Few people (incl myself) really have a good understanding of what is meant by inertia and why it is so perplexing. There are some great examples I've come across in the past that demonstrate, but I'll have to look them up. In the mean time take a look at the "Inertial frames" section on the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia
I'd like to keep my callbacks where they belong.
> Success is essentially all that's valued at both an educational and social level, which entirely ignores the value of actually learning something, improving your future attempts.

Which I find quite strange, especially as our Western culture wouldn't have existed without Socrates, who championed the exact same ideas you're talking about :)
I agree, but it's not 3am across the entire world, it's 9:47am here in the UK, for example.
There is nothing stopping most businesses from doing that at the moment.
Surely with any compiled language the "build" (or build server) has everything to do with deployment? You have to build it somewhere, either on a build server, on a server elsewhere (AppHarbor style), or on your local machine.

You could cut the build machine out by building locally and pushing the binaries out via git, but that's just really an implementation detail.
It is fascinating to see people having 24+" monitors -- and seeing ca 30 lines of code on their screen, because of the real estate eaten by their IDEs.

To add maiming to injury, these guys write in modern Cobol (a.k.a Java).

Not to mention that they can't print the code -- since it is 150+ chars wide(!) -- and browse it at a cafe. (I love my iPad, but It'll be iPad 3 before it is half as nice for browsing code [edit: as paper].)

I have about 2 full pages of code on the same size of monitor. Of scripting language. I doubt that I have abnormally bad memory or write too complex code... I just like to be productive.

Edit: oK, downvote if you want. But please also add a counter argument for wasting all that screen area?
Not sure. It's per request, but I'm guessing they only ask for the info of one person at a time.
I think the problem in the past has been that developers in general (commercial as well as open source) have chosen to build 'flexibility' and 'customisation' over thinking user interface design through, making a decision about the way something should work and sticking with it. It's a somewhat rational response to bikeshedding: if you can't please all the users, make it configurable and let the users indulge in bikeshedding to their hearts' content - just keep it outside of the source tree. Thankfully the ascendency of good user interface design on the web and in successful consumer products (notably, though not exclusively, from Apple) has started to place value on clean, well thought-out user interfaces.

I think one of the things that Gnome has achieved over the years is removing lots of configuration options, and battling the hostile responses of a vocal minority who would choose complexity for everyone so that they can tweak any minor detail. Remember the backlash when Gnome replaced Sawfish with Metacity as its default window manager, and users could no longer script the window manager in a dialect of Lisp?

I'm all for options to personalise the user interface where it make sense, but if I have to start configuring your software in order to make it usable for the job it's supposed to be designed for, you've failed.
No, we still don't have invisibility cloaks
You've missed the point the article. FTA:

"Enrique Allen, the firm’s designer and the founder of its accelerator program, announced The Designer Fund today at 500 Startups’ first Demo Day. He noted that many successful startups including YouTube, Tumblr, Android, and Flickr were founded by designers. That’s not surprising, he said, since designers have a deep understanding of people’s real problems and are paid really well to make what people really want, compared to many startups that fail because they make what people don’t want...

Hence the creation of The Designer Fund. The goal is to invest in startups that are founded by designers..."

This isn't about designers being co-founders; this is about designers being founders. Do you still agree? To be perfectly frank, I do.
20 Years of Linux down, and the best is yet to come
Wouldn't there be an escrow problem ?
Yahoo: The Linux Company
They will no doubt outsource the ideas + production to more capable people.

I, for one, welcome our new overlords -- so long as they don't restrict the content to the US of A. Not being from the US of A I haven't had the luxury of watching Hulu or anything similar, which is a bit of a bummer.

Though I fear that the YouTube homegrown shows will be aimed at Teens and not 20-something hackers.
Google/Admob earned more than $100.000 from my back and closed my account
I am/was a publisher on Admob Mobile ad network since 3 years and I believe they have made around $100.000 from adverts I have published in last 3 years.

Yesterday, I've noticed that my account was closed. I didn't get any explanation or warning at all. After so many attempts they replied. It read: "After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdMob account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we've found it necessary to disable your AdMob account. "

I've lost pending and god knows how much of my future earnings just because their ultra clever algorithms believed that my account was a risk.

I'm not the only one http://groups.google.com/group/admob-publisher-discuss/topics?hl=en full of complaints. Some lost $6.000.

Can I sue them?
I don't think so, because this can be done over a cup of coffee. Everybody is in the Bay Area anyways :)
...yeah. :)

Speaking of the UK, I'm really liking the Hitchhiker's Guide references sprinkled in the article. (reading via the PDF link above)
More specifically, if you have Firebug, then it slows down Gmail considerably.
Interval time is what you use for measuring time intervals. It flows at a rate of 1 second per 9,192,631,770 periods of a particular kind of microwave radiation. It is unaffected by politics, astronomy, etc.

Wall-clock time is what you use when you want to know whether it's 12.34am or 12.35am. It usually increments at the same rate as interval time, but sometimes there are leap seconds, daylight saving time, timezone changes, etc.

Using wall-clock time when what you really want is interval time may result (e.g.) in what was meant to be a 1ms wait turning into a 1hour+1ms wait. That would be bad.
Ask HN: Y Combinator Application Results Day is here finally 
Ycombinator Application Results Day is here finally! Anyone receive any accepts / rejects yet? I am still waiting for the result. Please post if you had applied and have received anything!
A decade ago it looked like O'Caml was going to be the language that brought FP to the masses. It had good runtime performance, good tools, and a decent library. Then the development team basically did no work on the language for some eight or so years, and other languages, notably Scala, F#, and Haskell, have gained ground.

It is hard to cross from academia to commerce. The changes that were (and are) needed to O'Caml are not things that will result in publications, and thus don't fit the academic funding model. At the same time they are a precursor to attracting wider interest in the language. It seems that a benefactor like Jane Street is needed for this to occur. Certainly it seems that Jane Street is eager to spend money to fix this problem.

The story of O'Caml is a good reminder that in language adoption, as in business, execution, along with a bit of luck, what matters. The world is full of could-have-beens. And on that note, I've got code to write...
It seems rather strange to describe this by saying that "delayed gratification" leads to more impulse buying. What leads to more impulse buying is making everyone look at all the merchandise.
User's actual password is of very limited use to enforcement officials. Just provide the short "login history" to the user at each login and they'll have a chance to notice strange accesses of their account.
In general, the law frowns upon the sort of pedantic cleverness geeks love.
Which open source licence?
I'd say, round $0.1 right now.