skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And what, exactly, do you want FeedBurner to do? They're just using the number NetVibes gives them and I doubt NetVibes is going to give them the ability to inspect user accounts to check for dupe subscriptions. So unless your solution for FeedBurner is "don't count NetVibes (or other aggregators that report inaccurately)", there's nothing for them to do.
Best of Open Source Software awards
If you are like me, most programming you do is about gluing things together with libraries.

Then I am not like you.
Spolsky is a star?
Good paper, but I wonder how relevant these optimizations are now that modern processors include indirect branch predictors.
FCC encrochment of the internet.
Is there a HTML version somewhere we can read this online?

Why ask people to download and print PDF?
not that you have to, but PDF's are meant for that and there are 40 pages.

40 * number of readers who will print = Lots of paper waste.

Will check out content though.
>Just an observation, but societies with vast disparities of wealth tend to be poorer overall and to have flatter economic growth.

I would love some numbers to back up that claim. I know that poor repressive governments tend to have high income disparity while the Western world tends to have less. However the last time I looked at the numbers I don't think the data showed that income disparity is a major causal factor in making a country poor or rich. It sounds to me like that is the dream of envious leftists, one of many unquestioned assumptions that they like to bring up in every debate.

There's a difference between a third-world country where the favored friends of the state are well-off while everybody else starves (see Zimbabwe) and a rich country where everybody is well-off but some are more well-off than others (see Britain). I question the "if you don't give us more money, we'll riot and break stuff" justification for income redistribution in a rich first-world country.

Also, third-world countries should be focused on getting rich, not redistributing what little wealth they have. I am highly skeptical of the benefits of income redistribution under any circumstances.
Same thing could have been said about Facebook re: MySpace. :)

Seriously though, this is a good point. Any time you go up against a competitor with a product in market, billions in the bank, and a huge incentive to make there product succeed at all costs, you better have a pretty frickin' solid differentiation story before you start down this path...even then, good luck...
Correlation != Causation

Many African countries (i.e. Zimbabwe) are extremely poor overall and have great wealth disparities. But it seems highly unlikely that there's a direct causal relationship (it's more likely that there's a third cause behind both conditions, i.e. government corruption).

If we throw out the bad datapoints and restrict our search to countries with relatively stable or well-established governments, I suspect you will find that the reverse is true, on the whole. Most U.S. economic growth happened during the oil boom and/or Rockefeller and/or train monopolies and/or ... Even recently, the first .com bubble coincided with Microsoft/antitrust. Contrast these periods with the relatively slow growth of Iceland, a stable country with low economic disparity.

Iceland is probably a great place to live (never been there). But I'm guessing they still put gas in their cars and use Windows and buy pharmaceuticals from the US.
"""What we had hoped for was more awareness, some recognition that their position needed explaining and even justification."""

Why does their position need justification?

"""They could not see that the pleasure they derived from possessions, prospects and doing well by their children is universal and that others deserve a share of that, too."""

Would the authors care explain on what grounds others "deserve" a share?

"""A last defence against paying more tax was their absolute conviction that government is inefficient and could not to be trusted with a penny more."""

Not-rich people seem to think that rather a lot, too.

"""One banker said he thought a family of four receives "say, £3,000 a month in their hands, and they're somewhere miles up north. They're not going to earn that sort of money, so where's the incentive for them to go out to work?" In fact, a family of four would in 2008 receive a net total of £1,328 a month."""

That's still the after-tax take home of someone on the average salary mentioned earlier. Free. Ad-hom Scroogey name calling wont help.
Assignment incomplete:

"Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven’t taken the world by storm, and how you’re going to beat that."

The author needs to deal with this head-on.

To some extent he addresses it implicitly by talking about gaining traction the same way Facebook did. This implies that the author thinks that existing web Office tools haven't gained traction because they're too diffusely targeted. The author seems to think that if a web Office tool had a clustered communities of users, this would somehow drive adoption of a web Office replacement. This is an interesting idea, but I think it's inadequately motivated in the writeup. Do college students comprise the right population for these sorts of clusters? I don't think so. I think college students collaborate too infrequently for them to bother adopting such a tool, especially on projects requiring Office-like functionality. If they need to collaborate in this way (once or twice in their career?) they'll just email each other Office documents, or maybe use Google Docs.
Here's what I do:

$password = hash_hmac(sha256,$_POST['password'],"pound_on_your_keyboard_here");

256 bits of hashed goodness. Goodluck breaking that with a rainbow table.
Judge OKs Tivo-in-the-clouds
If the newbie programmers are professionals worthy of the name, those errors won't make it into production. A less complex parser will have tremendous leverage by making it easier to craft syntax-aware programming tools. Smalltalk has a history of amazing ground-breaking programmer tools written by single individuals years ahead of their appearance in other languages. Contrast this with Ruby. I like Ruby a lot. It's a great language. The syntax is a bit hairy, however. Teams of people worked for a couple of years to produce an ANTLR parser which is independent of the Ruby VM's parser and could be used for programming tools.

A good programmer can just crank out a top-down Smalltalk parser in one day. If you make your language easy to work with, you get a more powerful toolset sooner. On top of that, the lowered barrier to entry gets you more real innovation in that toolset.
The Rubyist - new Ruby magazine
Erlang as middleware
And not nearly as productive.
OpenCL as the CUDA killer
I think university students would also like an easy way to make documents that follow the guidelines of various journals.

For example, when I need to follow APA style, I use the LaTeX "apa.cls" document class. However, I think the average psych student manually formats their documents in Word.
DNS poisoning enables a MITM attack even if you're connecting to your safe, legitimate domain.
Chinese tech entrepreneur seeks global brand
In the programming/blogging/startup sector? Yes. Like or dislike Joel, you would know who JL was referring to if she had mentioned him just by his first name.
From the article:

But it irritates me when I need to get at gpg from a web application, and can't just use a "libgpg". I have to fork a gpg process, setup file descriptors just right, write input to a pipe, wait for input on another pipe, and then parse the result

It boggles the mind that a perl programmer, of all people, would think this. The relevant code for the above is generally something like:

my $data = `gpg --decrypt --passphrase=$PASSWD $FILE`;

or:

open INPUT, "gpg --decrypt --passphrase=$PASSWD $FILE|";
while(<INPUT>) { ... }

The incredibly tight integration with external programs (e.g. the code to "setup file descriptors just right" consists of one byte!) is the very essence of what makes perl great and special. I'm just dumbfounded here. He likes perl but doesn't understand how to fork a process?

I mean, the whole premise of the point is counter to the perl philosophy, which is that you're already on a great and useful platform and just need a tool to tie things together nicely. If you want a single platform designed around the idea that all meaningful tasks are available in a library without leaving the sandbox, you are looking at Java or .NET, certainly not perl...
My partner and I haven't put our finger on the "product" yet. It would be helpful to understand the true back-end to an e-tailing or e-retailing type business.
News and Content in a Digital World
a real attack might be like this

find rainbow table with a char space of

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQURSTUVWXYZ0123456789!@#$%^&*()_+=-';:"`

you now have a working hash map of 27-80gb of data.

upon looking through the user/pass table you see that the user/pass table has a salt key for each record. at this point you know that some portion of the passwords will be reversible with the salt being a confirmation of finding the correct password.

i know some of the rainbow tables out there are really fast at looking up a reverse md5 or sha1.

pass look up in rainbow table you will at least find a collision, and if you are lucky, you will find the pass concatenated to the salt entry in the table.

so if a hacker has your user/pass table, yikes.... ;-/ you are better off restricting read/write privileges to separate services. i would hate for a hacker to connect to your DB and to write their own salt and pass.

we were working on this for one of the defcon games last year.

NEVER REPLACE OBFUSCATION FOR REAL SECURITY.

fighting rainbow tables requires larger hash functions that generate larger hashspaces that are less likely to fit on a single machine. i still wonder how long it will take for a proper cluster of GPUs to virtualize the hash space of a rainbow table into computational power.
but then go ahead and distribute the money in a manner that has 100 times more to do with office politics than actual productivity.

Of course, the alternative to this (i.e. distribution by a government) would be the distribution of wealth that has an infinite number of times more to do with _actual_ politics.

Office politics is at least distributed, i.e. there are several companies that distribute their own individual wealth according to some non-perfect system. But some will be more perfect than others, and hopefully natural selection will reward those more than others.

Government redistribution does not have that characteristic. But not only is it missing the only piece of redeeming value in any distribution system, it is not in essence any different than the private redistribution system. That is, there are still people deciding how to spend money. It is true that people are flawed; but they are no less flawed because we call them government. In fact they are more so: we have removed the only incentive to improve redistribution that they may have had.

But then it is not easy to silence the voices of those who ask whether it is not paradoxical to entrust the nation's welfare to the decisions of voters whom the law itself considers incapable of managing their own affairs; whether it is not absurd to make those people supreme in the conduct of government who are manifestly in need of a guardian to prevent them from spending their own income foolishly." - Ludwig von Mises
The article is incredibly trite and vapid, a three-page exercise in rubbing the author's unquestioned (and in his mind, unquestionable) Marxist assumptions in the reader's face. I'm hoping that this will be the worst article on Hacker News today. It will be hard to beat.
I wonder if the recent resurgence of Apple will have a positive effect on the usability of the entire software industry. With so many geeks using macbook pros, it's only a matter of time before that aesthetic finds its way into more open source projects.
Wow, what a difference in perspective. I couldn't imagine wanting to marry a woman who even cared about the number of women I've slept with. My wife and I were both very "friendly" before we met each other and neither of us has ever even bothered to ask the other how many people we've slept with. It simply doesn't matter to me.

I wonder what your criteria for "marriage-worthy woman" is.
> The end result is that the syntax and implementation compromises of your language don't really matter much.

Hm. To me that's pretty much all that matters. I want powerful features and a nice syntax.

> Python doesn't have lexical closures like Perl's

What does that mean? Doesn't Python have lexical closures?
I find it amusing you singled him out. Of the three, he's without a doubt the most well known.
How does an iterative password cracker work?
SSL throws all sorts of warnings if the cert doesn't match the domain.
Now $PASSWD is available to anyone running "ps". The GPG manual suggests that you open a separator file descriptor for the passphrase.

Basically, it's easy to do things if you aren't aiming for security or correctness, but in this case, I am.
As you can see in the video they add 1000 times the same feedurl. there is no reason to allow this so it would be extremely easy to fix for Netvibes.
15 points to reveal the “Launching a Startup is easy” myth. (2/15)
Yahoo Shortcuts: automated links gone wild
Well, is it physical? Do you need to ship it, or just download it? Getting a transaction done is different from having to ship it, keep track of inventory, keep pages updated, etc. You don't need to update inventory of software you're selling as a download, its always there. But it matters when you have a physical product, because good software can help figure out shipping costs, taxes, etc.

There are a lot of turn-key solutions, like Yahoo or Ebay Stores, Amazon's Webstore, and a few more. Others let you build their code into your site, which can make for a more seamless appearance, but also involves a lot more coding work. Really, your product might dictate your software, so maybe you should figure it out first, and then concentrate on which features you want. They usually all have tradeoffs and benefits. Like I said, its hard to get good, objective info on them, but figure out your business first and then start looking.
We had a RescueTime group tracking founders in our class where we could look at the aggregate data of how founders spent their time. Rarely did anyone actually spend more than 5-6 hours in their dev tools, and rarely did they spend more than 10-11 hours per day on their computers.

Note that this is DURING YC-- the most intense months of hte experience. Since then, these numbers have declined a bit.

I really love the "unconditional love from a cult leader" part of this particular string of trolls. Paul is decidedly NOT loving-- in fact, he's kinda brutal. :-)
Python has closures but has issues when changing variables within them. This leads most people to agree that Python's implementation of closures is insufficient.

See the following link for an example and more details:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-July/27095...

Instead of list boxing, you can also use a function attribute to handle changing the variable in the correct scope.
Watch Stargate SG1 Episodes Free
Debuting over ABC on July 27, 1997, the 60-minute science fiction series Stargate SG1 TV Show was a continuation of the 1995 theatrical feature Stargate. The original film starred James Spader as eccentric scientist Daniel Jackson and Kurt Russell as Col. Jack O’Neill, who by being transported
Heh, cool, the trap worked:

$PASSWD was available to everyone on the box anyway. You stick it in memory, it's readable. That's the way life works. You probably stuck it in a database too, right? Did you lock down the socket from local users? Probably not. Did you store the database password off-line? Probably not, because you wanted unattended startup to work.

The bottom line is that if you want to do password storage in your web app that is secure against local users, you have vastly more work to do than just finding a CPAN library somewhere.
Programming languages are just as much social/cultural constructs as spoken ones. The language's technical merits are just one factor. Sometimes, a bigger factor is the community which uses that language.

Choice of language makes a difference in productivity to your team, but in many cases, this will be swamped by other factors, like how experienced and knowledgeable they are and how well they work together.

Then again, there are highly specialized domains where a language will make you 100X more productive than another.
<i>If you are just doing something for fun/learning, there is no need to release it to the world.</i>

There's no need to keep it from the world either.
I think he raises two really interesting points

* How do I choose which things I want to share when most sharing becomes more ambient?

* How do we filter which things we want to see?

I think the second problem is being worked on a lot more right now than the first.

I also think that we should consider the issue of privacy. In order to give better recommendations a company needs more data, where is the balance between the best recommendations and handing over too much information to one company. Is there a way of providing recommendations with distributed data so that no one company has access to it all?
Racking | Shelving
Ouch! However, this counts as a risk with a not-so-fortunate outcome right? For most people, a mistake would be the gap between the risks they took and their innate risk-taking ability. In startupspeak, there's nothing wrong with a steady job if you aren't an adrenalin junkie, and there's nothing wrong with multiple bombed ventures if you are.
Heh, cool, the trap worked:

You win the Internets!
Ask YC:  Anyone up for a meetup this Thursday night in Sunnyvale?
A group of Hackers and Founders are getting together this Thursday in Sunnyvale. Feel free to drop by if you're in the area.

http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/
"The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. But that doesn't seem to bother Britain's wealthiest earners."

How surprising... ;)
The message: White-collar business owners and key founding personnel should not receive vast compensation.

Hacker News: White-collar business owners and key founding personnel.

Hacker News Response: Outrage!

(To be fair, though, the Guardian is frothingly liberal, and as a merely left-of-center liberal I can honestly say it usually makes me wince.)
As I recall, Photoshop doesn't have a line tool, either; you make lines with the brush tool and the shift key, just like in GIMP -- or you use the vector tools.

For people accustomed to basic painting applications that provide all manner of circles, lines, and squares, it comes as a surprise that such tools are so buried in Photoshop or GIMP. But it turns out that drawing lines is simply not that important for most Photoshop users, since lines aren't that important for photo touchup, creating web graphics, or digital painting. For line-heavy art, there are better tools like Illustrator.

The problem is that GIMP is tasked with replacing both Photoshop and MS Paint on the Linux desktop. The hidden assumption is that since Photoshop is more "powerful", its feature set is adequate for typical MS Paint tasks... which is akin to assuming that Linux doesn't need a word processor because TeX is more powerful.
<search term> site:<city>.craigslist.org on Google seems to work pretty well.
You caught me, man! I actually did have a few paragraphs tackling this but to be perfectly honest A) it was really boring and B) given my status as an MS employee I do need to be a little careful with what I say around this. Not even so much around pro-Microsoft stuff, but more around stuff that is against efforts that our competitors are doing. In other words, to fully address this I'd have to talk smack on Google docs, which could be seen as what we like to call in the consulting world as a CLM (career limiting move) :)

That being said, anyone who has been using web-based Office alternatives and wants to address this, I'd love to hear thoughts either here or within the comments in the original post.
Every article like this should come equipped with a disclaimer link to Spolsky's Lord Palmerston essay:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html

Because, though this is a relatively sober and even-handed example of the genre, it still inevitably contains howlers like this:

Search for "rails". Most of these programmers will depend on one library, Rails, but then get the rest of their code by cutting-and-pasting from blogs.

Someone has never heard of gems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyGems

Which is hardly surprising. This is the canonical problem with articles like this one: The guy doesn't waste time tinkering with Ruby, because he's busy being productive with Perl, so why should he be expected to know anything about how the Ruby community works?

(This is why I try not to write about Python except to assert that it must be one of the best languages in the world: I'm literally unsure how to write hello, world in Python, but smart people use it all over the place, so deference and politeness forces me to assume that it's utterly perfect until proven otherwise.)

Anyway, I'll help out by saying that I think jrockaway's point still stands, albeit on fewer legs than before: Perl is a considerably older language, its community is more experienced, it's (among other things) a traditional tool of system administrators -- who are, in my experience, relentlessly pragmatic people who crave stability, reliability, and clear docs -- and so it has had a lot more time and incentive to organize and standardize its packaging and documentation systems. Ruby does have docs difficulties, as do many open-source projects which have recently experienced explosive growth.
No, the whole point of SSL is that it is not vulnerable to MITM attacks, because the client carries anchor keys.
The certificate needs to match the domain and bear a signature chain that traces back to your root certificate store. SSL was designed to assume that the DNS is totally insecure, which of course it always has been.
Nah, I'm well aware of the sums necessary to secure, say, 20 years of retirement at $80,000 a year. I see that "what's your number" ad on TV and laugh at anyone carrying around less than a million. It just seems to me that if you're in a position where failing and being fired nets you half a million in a stainless steel case, retirement is just never going to be a topic of concern ... if you're willing to adopt a middle-class lifestyle, of course.
I don't see how reguarly posted crap takes anything away from occasional quality. Of course the people who post regularly get the most subscribers - they produce the most stuff! But I subscribe to about 200 feeds, most (150+) of which don't publish even once a week. Without RSS I would never bother to follow them.
The salt is "439a". The MD5 hash of a<439a> is "57ec1dc4757768c9961ec5a46eb2a36f". Did that match? No? The MD5 hash of aa<439a> is "91b0655c6ab36ee9fc9fea0bda7f78ab". Did that match? No? The MD5 hash of aal<439a> is "9c9e018c05d4d7a36b31eb17e3b71c7d". Did that match? Yes? You win.

The point is, MD5 is extremely fast. Speed is one of the top 3 design goals of MD5, SHA1, and SHA256.
It is this attitude that leaves us stuck with things like Unix and Windows.

The reluctance to break free from legacy technologies allows them to build more and more momentum. Unfortunately, this momentum delays innovation.
Hey Dave just adding what I sent to you by email for posterity...

http://www.ecommerce-blog.org/
http://www.varien.com/blog/
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/webtogs-diary-of...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-new-rules-for-successful-ecomm...
He makes an interesting point: there's a big gap now between "no nudity" and full-out porn. The question is: can that gap be successfully (and profitably) filled?