skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He doesn't even really mention apple once in his article. He clearly loves most things apple, but he wouldn't hesitate to criticize apple if they do silly things.

Its much more convincing to criticize his argument than just him. He makes a strong point - Software interfaces only are as good as the head guy in charge cares about. So if the head guy doesn't care much about the interface, the interface will suck even if there are great designers working on the project.

I'd say that open source software often has medium to poor interface quality is that making software look good takes a lot of time and has to be done by someone with design talent. This isn't usually the case - usually the lead programmer decided how it would look from the beginning, or just copied some other software.

If anything, open source software is usually decent because they most often just copy some commercial piece of software - which is usually decent. In the few cases where they get creative with the interface (like the gimp) it can come out half-baked because they don't spend enough time evaluating the usability of the design. (not that the gimp interface is half-baked).
Microsoft sees end of Windows era
Is your wireless network a tool for terrorists?
You might support an obscure terrorist clan without even knowing it...
So why are Apple's customers not demonstrating in the street for Apple to lock down OS X? I think the ability of 3rd-party developers to write software for OS X is a great risk to the usability and stability of the platform. I don't think Apple-Users need anything but iTunes and Photoshop, anyway.
Thanks Jim! I gotta say, out of all the ideas I've posted so far, this one is probably my favorite. If anyone does want to pick this up, shoot me a mail at kleneway@hotmail.com and I can offer some additional thoughts and features that I didn't have time to detail out in the post (free of charge + no strings attached, as always).
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Something else I think you'll probably agree with, even though it sounds hyperbolic: if this stuff sounds complicated, it's because it's supposed to be complicated.

There's an "easy" answer, which is simply "don't hack this stuff up yourself". The free options here are strong. Why waste your time with trivia?
The smug superiority of the author really annoys me. Add to that the effort made to make the "rich guys" sound as evil as possible. For instance:

"But did they work 10 times as hard as a teacher on £30,000 a year or, in the case of some lawyers and bankers, 100 times as hard?"

It's not about how hard you work, it's about how much free time you have left AFTER work. Considering 8 hours of sleep, a commute, overhead for food and exercise and general life maintenance, a guy who works 80 hours a week really has very little spare time left. Easily 10 times less than a teacher.

Then the author makes those infuriating "Of course, the poor didn't deserve it." comments. Of course people don't -deserve- benefits. Benefits are charity - you get them because the state pities you. Handing out benefits is the ethical thing to do - but that doesn't mean you're -entitled- to them.

The article is shit.
Of course the jailbreakers threw together a dev environment quickly. They didn't have to make a business decision to do so. They didn't need a budget or a strategic plan. They didn't need buy-in from anyone.

They didn't have to have their decisions vetted by a management team and a legal team. They almost certainly didn't do any usability testing or write a set of human interface guidelines. They didn't have to make design decisions that they could live with for the next five years, or (as with the decisions made by the designers of the original Mac OS) twenty-five years.

They didn't need to make an official announcement, or run a beta program lasting several months so that developers had a chance to have apps ready on launch day. They didn't have to invest in developer training materials or write formal documentation.

They didn't have to build an entire app store that was secure, cross-platform, usable by customers, relatively free of bugs, and ready to scale so that it would handle one million users in its first weekend.

And, when the jailbreak apps break, the developers don't get hammered by guys like Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, and every analyst and pundit on Wall Street. When end users complain that their phone battery life is too short, the jailbreakers don't need to respond. They aren't obligated to fix security holes or support developers who have problems. They aren't obligated to support anyone. They're open-source hackers, they can't get fired, and they always have the option to say caveat emptor and go do something else.

There's a reason why people pay for Apple's stuff. Apple adds value. But adding value takes time and money.
Or am I missing something?

Yes: Users pick stupid passwords; and each user's salt is stored along with the hashed password.

Suppose someone has a password of "a" and you get access to a password file containing (user, salt, MD5(salt || password)) tuples. You start with single-letter passwords, and you promptly find this user's password. The salt meant that you had to check if each user's password was "a" individually instead of checking them all at once -- but if the password function is fast enough and a user's password is simple enough, you'll break it anyway.
http://www.collectedthoughts.com/

At least it isn't a spam blog. You might be able to argue fair use.
That does not happen in Firefox 3 or Opera 9.5, so I suspect yours is the one that's broken :)
Agreed. Indeed, most of the rewrites I've seen look like this:
RewriteRule .* /index.php
I have the iPhone 3G after upgrading from my first-gen iPhone. Honestly, it's not any more useful than the old one. 3G sucks the battery in only a couple of hours. I live in San Francisco and the 3G coverage is so sporadic and unreliable it switches back to edge anyway. I mainly just leave 3G off.

The gps is next to useless. It doesn't matter if I'm inside or outside, it never really works. I can be side by side with a Garmin that locates me exactly while the iphone only sees a 10 block radius.

So basically, buy an iPhone. I absolutely loved my first-gen. Had it jailbroken for the better part of a year. Edge was slow, but was reliable. The jailbroke apps that the hacker community put together were much better than the crap that's coming out of the App Store.

It's a great phone, but 3g/gps isn't the reason why.
Yes. You're missing the attack that actually happens in the real world:

aardvark<salt> ac23b37db0039dda62896bb21f312755

abandon<salt> 5877f7f5836225442bf103c2e7d41a3f

abdominal<salt> 93e399d54bcf903ce686122118a5f52f

etc etc etc etc

The problem is that MD5 is lightning fast, as is SHA1 and even, for this application, SHA256. Unix password schemes have been designed for decades with the goal of not being as fast as message digest functions, so that attackers can't burn through entire dictionaries on the fly in reasonable amounts of time.
Thanks for the responses. I'll need to talk things over with the other person that has become involved in the project, because even though it's more-or-less my baby, I don't want him to feel that his work is just going to go towards making money for me.

I think mechanical_fish may be right, in that I've been thinking of my time as cheap, which is strikingly uncharacteristic for me. It is true that I've put a shocking amount of time into this, when I could have been doing something to earn an income, so perhaps it isn't so unreasonable to try and get a bit of cash out of the process.

Thanks!

Also, I like the 'semester' and 'lifetime' pricing models. The lifetime subscription model appeals most to me, as most language students seem to fade out after two years. So, if I base my pricing on that assumption, the application should be able to cover its costs, and for those who stick around longer, it'll just be a little reward for their hard work.

callosum: An email is on its way.

queensnake: Unfortunately, while I could write the application itself in Python, the supporting libraries are not readily portable, and neither are the bits of C glue that I've had to write to link everything together. So, AppEngine is out.
It looks like a lot of people are missing the point of the original article, so I wrote a long-winded reply here:

http://blog.jrock.us/articles/You%20are%20missing%20the%20po...
I don't see this as that much different from Google Docs.

A little bit more social features and an emphasis on the college crowd but that's all.
The time it takes bcrypt to verify one password is a tunable parameter; that's the fundamental feature of the algorithm. If you want a password check to take one full second, you can do that. A dictionary attack against one six-character password on that system, even offline against a captured hash, would take years.
Why I stick with Perl
You really believe that? I simply can't believe anyone would find working with complex data structures in C easier than in Perl. It just doesn't make sense, but obviously a few people agree with you. Have you actually worked in Perl (and C)?
It would be great if we could just give a consistent, clear recommendation for people to use bcrypt here. You're a BSD person, I assume you like Mazieres and Niels as much as I do.
MD5(MD5(MD5(etc))) is still pretty silly. Why hack? Do it right.
I know some folks that did that and regretted it. Well, maybe not the travel part, but I've got various friends that have started bands/gotten arrested/had fun and kinda wish they hadn't.
My issue with the article is that it's anecdotal and biased. He interviewed a bunch of degenerate, conservative rich assholes and used their opinions to paint "the rich" in a negative light, as if they were a monolithic group. Is the fact that most bankers and corporate leaders are uncultured douchebags news to anyone?
Could not agree any more strongly about this. You still need to use bcrypt to store passwords, because you will eventually screw up Unicode and SQL on a complicated form somewhere and give up your whole password database. But if you're willing to spend ever a quarter person/day on password auth, there is no economy at all to skipping SSL.
business decision ... strategic plan ... buy-in ... vetted by ... legal team ... formal documentation

If these are really the reasons for the SDK's delay and ugliness, then we should celebrate: Apple is already dying. This is just silly. Truly successful products (including the iPhone) happen without this stuff all the time, and these are never required criteria. Your list is just a list of excuses.
I can't help but post a joke here:

A new convict arrives at a Gulag labor camp.
Everyone gathers around the new man.

- What's your sentence?

- Twenty years.

- What for?

- Nothing, I am innocent!

- Bullsh-t. Innocent people get five.
Hashed passwords are not normally attacked with rainbow tables. This is a huge misconception. The overwhelming majority of password attacks are done with iterative password crackers. "Rainbow table" crackers are a recent phenomenon, but password crackers are one of the oldest and most effective tricks in the book.
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Human Computer Interaction. Specifically, I wrote about using participatory and user centred design for implementing ubiquitous computing systems in non-office environments (in order to improve HCI).
College kids have DC++, Demonoid, ThePiratebay, and very little sense of ethics.

Not gonna work.

In fact, I feel as if this will never really take off for the simple reason that people don't want to have to be connected just to edit their word documents. They want to do that anywhere, connection or not, and as such office apps wont be ported to the internet on a wide scale unless they have something else to offer.
Increased crime and lawlessness are also symptoms of vast disparities of wealth, yes. Your point?
Can you just use those as a "Contacts" base? Think of those networks just as sources for contacts.

Let users, point to a network with their profiles as a source for contacts. Allowing for many of these to be setup, i.e. one for each network/profile so a user can even use multiple accounts on a network (if they have that). Also allow for your own internal contacts base that is NOT hooked up to a social network.
If the iPhone does become as unreliable as a computer, AppleT&T is in for some trouble. Let's hope the 2.1 update fixes this.
The danger is that you have to discipline yourself to refactor -- you can't just stay in hack mode or it's Big Ball of Mud time. Hack-and-refactor is a straight and narrow path. It's hard for analytical modelers like me to commit to the hacking part; it's hard for go-with-the-flow cowboys to commit to the refactoring part.
interesting - thanks very much for the comment
Clarify your Internet Business Story
A good set of questions to "test" your idea.
Of course, with redistribution, that actually becomes the case...

Redistribution is a necessary evil, though. It's zero-sum* in the immediate term, but it's a necessary upkeep measure for the long-term health of society.

Money is essentially a device for allocating resources to those who have put them to good/profitable use in the past. The problem with it is that there are so many degeneracies, such as crime and dumb luck, that also influence the flow of money. Foremost among these degeneracies is the way money is filtered through large corporations. Large companies profit or fail on account of reasonable market forces, but then go ahead and distribute the money in a manner that has 100 times more to do with office politics than actual productivity. Inheritances are also an enormous corrupting influence, in that they bequeath large amounts of capital to individuals who are entirely unworthy of the influence that it provides.

I tend to think of money and capitalism as shoddy (but the best we have) AI algorithms that need to be continuously tweaked in order to avoid divergence. If you start from an initial state where everyone is roughly equal, and allow capital to flow via a money economy, you'll have a system where more productive people have more control of the resources, and progressive improvements will result. Eventually, though, the degeneracies take over, and it starts to erode society; an elite selected not on merit emerges, and uses its influence to restructure society in its favor further, much in the way a cancer starves a body.

(* edit: I'd actually even argue against redistribution being "zero-sum" in any meaningful sense. From a utilitarian perspective, it's arguably positive-sum so long as we accept that the utility curve of material wealth is concave.)
You can't rely entirely on SSL. You're still vulnerable to man in the middle attacks, among other things.
It's K, a successor to the J programming language.
Working on a music recommendation service for which an API is quite high up the feature list. Email me at maryrosecook [at] gmail [dot] com
Actually, my problem is disciplining myself to hold off on refactoring. But I understand what you mean -- there are far too many people who aren't interested in going back over stuff they've already written.
As I said elsewhere, if you don't like it, don't buy one. Maybe the stores will actually be able to keep some in stock for a while.
On Techcrunch too: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/all-it-takes-to-inflate...
Andrew Chen: 7 ideas for billion dollar companies in online ads
One would have to have data about the relative sizes of student bodies of all schools everywhere vs. the Ivy League schools, which I don't have.

But, it's easy to say that a lot of the YC company founders that I know came from the following schools:

Stanford (by far the leader, I'm sure)

MIT

Oxford (a surprise to me)

CMU

But, a lot also came from other places. I can think of examples from UPenn, University of Florida, many of the UC schools, Monash University (in Australia), as well as folks who don't actually have a university degree (me, for example--I went to a bunch of different schools for a bunch of different subjects, and none worth speaking of).

I suspect the "disproportionate" numbers are due to the basic fact that folks who go to an "elite" university are more likely to be highly ambitious, and school was just another way to achieve. Motivation plays a big role in getting into YC...and getting into and graduating from a top university takes a lot of ambition and motivation. I don't think YC thinks a lot about the college field on the application. If they did, Virtualmin wouldn't be a YC funded company; though my co-founder did go to a good school, I didn't know what it was when I filled out the application, so as far as YC could tell we were both marginally educated.
They look at everything, I'm sure, or they wouldn't ask.

But, I doubt it is considered a vital statistic...just another way to indicate motivation and ambition. I'm pretty sure pg and Co. know that university is not where most of the best hackers acquired their skills.
Well, obviously the article is hostile to the idea of being or becoming wealthy. Reading it, I'm reminded of the aphorism, that if one sees money as evil, they will find themselves without money.

One good thing about this article is that they did original research by actually locating and interviewing these high income earners. After filtering out the slant I found some interesting information.
Avoiding the Second System Effect in Software Development
They could just add in Gears support with some sort of merging rules for when the changes are posted back online.

Also, I believe that this idea has a lot to offer. The added value to the college student is the easy collaboration and especially social networking. I could see freshmen students using this because it both helps with their schoolwork and also connects them with other students for homework and projects.
MD5(MD5(MD5(etc))) is still pretty silly. Why hack? Do it right.

I wasn't suggesting that people should use iterated MD5 has a password hash. I was giving it as an example of how a password hash can be made more brute-force-resistant by doing extra work.

It would be great if we could just give a consistent, clear recommendation for people to use bcrypt here.

I'm not arguing with that. Hey everybody, do what Thomas says and use bcrypt!

But -- maybe due to my background in academia -- I think it's really important for people to understand why the authentication schemes they keep on inventing are bad. You're doing a good job of jumping in and telling everybody to use bcrypt -- so I'm taking care of explaining the cryptography so that people will understand what they're doing wrong and what bcrypt does right.
You've added a sentence to your post regarding requiring an example. What basis would there be for any legal suit if a company wasn't doing anything legally gray? Isn't that the point of a lawsuit?
Graduated with BA in comp.sci at 19 y.o. (not a mistake), then immediately took job doing web support stuff with big (non-tech) company.

In retrospect, I would have loved to look at more options (like starting my own company), but a) I honestly wasn't even aware of the y-combinator sorts of opportunities, b) I was engaged to be married, and felt pressure to be 'stable', and c) didn't think there was anything interesting in my area (and didn't want to leave).

So now (at 22) I'm working on a solo startup solo, in bits and pieces on the side. I just don't want to be like all the 30-year people surrounding me. Or the 10 year people. Or even the cynical, tired person I see myself becoming, all too rapidly ;). Must... not... give... in...
Now business people can see how silly it sounds when they start talking tech stuff to developers.
The "ship it" rubric very often trumps the refactor debate; coders and managers tend to see the refractoring entirely differently.
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I've used Authorize.net's solution. Cheap and reliable.

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From the article: "Mr. Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist..." - probably not a very good one.
The most interesting line to follow was Google. It was never at the top, but it was a snake slithering through all the results, patiently contributing at least 50% of the traffic.
I think that the much, much larger user base of Amazon that is voting with dollars rather than diggs is the big issue.
Intel to Nvidia: It’s time for you to die, Mr. Bond
That describes just about every medieval scholar. Reminds me of pg's essay about philosophy, which (I can independently verify) is mostly true. Though I think the field has gotten a lot more rigorous and interesting in the last few decades because philosophers now specialize to the point where they have enough expertise in their area to say interesting things about it. I can't vouch for present-day rabbis, though.
Wow, I suppose that this is a big issue for people, isn't it. I'd forgotted since I'm using Django. Django makes you craft your URLs from the start. Granted, you can still create crap URLs if you really want to, but Django makes it harder to do.
Like programmers?
Y combinator function in Ruby and Python
What James is referring to is not necessarily stripping out big pieces of code when they've been working in production for a while.
Rather the point is that in a given coding sprint, he gets the first thing that works going, then starts from there and rewrites them better if need be.
So it's just an approach to developing a given method or class rather than refactoring for the heck of it.
Could you explain further what sort of MITM attack you mean for which SSL doesn't help? (Are you assuming users who don't insist on an SSL connection with a recognized domain?)
Google was obviously a good company at the time. I just thought being #6 at this other startup would leave me better off financially than being employee 300-something at Google. Not the case.

In regards to YouTube, I was actually doing work for a YouTube competitor at the time. They sold their tech early to another YouTube competitor, but since I was a contract employee, not a founder, I didn't make any money off of the sale.
Points 1-4 seem fine. Furthermore, I should point out that if you consider recent benchmarks, the bottleneck was not the DB but the framework on top (ie. Django or ROR). Generally DBs are extremely well designed.

Furthermore, it is still possible to cluster DBs as long as there is one write master and multiple read masters (of course, this does not apply when there is a high ratio of writes).

I am not an expert on clustering so you should check that last statement.

For statement #5: If your are concerned about SPs, I would strongly advise against MySQL. SPs in MySQL are very new and thus their implementation may not be quite up to par. You might want to consider PostgreSQL. The pgplsql SP language is supposed to be nearly equivalent to Oracle SPs. Furthermore, postgres also allows SPs in python, tcl, and perl which should cover pretty much all use cases for SPs though you sacrifice portability with languages other than pgplsql. Postgres also has much better scaling performance.
I get the feeling Feynman would have licensed it with Creative Commons, given the chance.
Fixing uneven load balancing between Apache and Mongrel for Ruby on Rails applications
I don't think FeedBurner can fix this, short of not counting aggregators that incorrectly report subscriber numbers (like NetVibes is doing in this case).