skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does someone even conceive of something like that without realizing the glaring problem with it? How does it pass muster at a major corporation that has hired security consultants? This is utterly flabbergasting.

I could understand that much outrage if Sony deliberately designed the password reset process to require only e-mail address and DOB. However, the article says that the password reset page had an exploit that allowed you to do that. It's still shoddy security, but at least it's not sheer idiocy.
Shades of localroger's "Passages in the Void" (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/21/17846/757). His planet Minerva orbits a free-roaming gas giant.
Most apps who are able to make anything at all average somewhere around $4000-7000 in sales for the lifetime of their app. I can attest to that firsthand. Even at 70% it is not a viable business model for most (except for the <1% who are fortunate enough to make a lot of money in the app store). If every damned patent troll comes out of the woodwork claiming their share, then it will even be less worthwhile than it is now.
RailsConf 2011: Eric Ries on Lessons Learned
There are some problems with rendering this text in Chromium - words around some of the punctuation overlap. Also, I think that ESR's guide is much more informative:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

The OP omits some of the points I consider important - problem-solving attitude, low level programming, learning unix. Also I think that starting with both Python and Ruby is a bit strange idea - they are really similar (in almost every way I can think of) and such course of learning may cause some confusion (e.g. which pieces of syntax belong to which language?).
As an iOS developer, I want to know why Apple has not addressed this yet? Seriously.
Forget about the name, are you getting traction? Are users happy? That's what matters. You're just distracting yourself.
I have read (sorry, don't remember where) that there are often more signups at $12 than $10 since it's converted to a monthly cost of $1/month.
Sure, but from here: http://www.ehow.com/about_5030458_legal-contract-age.html

Minor children are not of legal contract age, that is to say, with few exceptions, they cannot consent to or enter into a binding contract until they reach the age of majority.

To me, this means their clicked "consent" is non-binding. For any normal written contract, parents co-sign consent. Not so with click-through agreements.

Then comes my personal nitpick with clicked "consent". What's the legal proof of identity of the clicker? The crap filled in the "User Info" screen? Could be fake. So what's really bound to whom?
If you know that every subfield of your state object is immutable, and you're using references instead of "local" copies (inconvenient unless you have garbage collection) then your copying costs are limited to the size of the overall state object plus whichever field changed.

Obviously this makes no sense for C++, but Clojure and OCaml get away with it and in Haskell it's the standard way of implementing almost every stateful computation.
No, I work full time at a start up that's doing a lot of hiring. I use it as one tool among many when doing some background searching on people interviewing for spots on my team. If we have any shared associations, I'll ping those people to see what their opinion is.

Sometimes you also get an alternate picture of work history on linkedin that their resume doesn't show you. Some jobs that they might have omitted/dropped/expanded in comparison.
Do not let your domain expire with Google Apps
"Someone like Kasparov would argue that a computer chess master is no more the intellectual superior of a human master than a calculator is the intellectual superior of a human mathematics PhD."

Except that there's a lot more to being good at math than just being good at calculation and memorization; not so in chess (at least not against computers).

Computers have proven that they've got what it takes to win the game. And, ultimately, that's all that really matters in chess as it is presently designed.

Of course, there are plenty of chess variants (not to mention games like Go) which are a lot harder for computers to play well. It is quite likely that that's where most serious chess players will migrate to over time.

In fact, for the last decades of his life, Bobby Fischer himself refused to play anything but Fischer Random Chess (also known as Chess 960), a variant which made it practically impossible to memorize a significant portion of opening theory, since in this variant there is not just a single opening position as in regular chess, but 960 of them.
It sounds like it won't be released under a libre license until it's merged into OpenJDK, so that'll be the interesting thing to wait for.
My first sentence just meant that you might model M, the number of miners, as a function of the profitability, P. P is a function of M.

There is a constant for M that is independent of P, M_power_leech.
I use GAE for a lot of projects that I've worked on (getcloak.com, walkscore.com, wherebe.us) and the pricing changes are going to hit me hard.

I've been a strong GAE proponent since the very early days [1]; GAE's sudden price announcement has made me question my belief in PaaS. Perhaps IaaS really is the level to build on: unless you're using bespoke stuff like AWS auto-scaling you can plausibly keep your infrastructure code "on the outside" of the service itself.

--

[1] Here's my talk at I/O 2009, when App Engine was young! http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/AppEngineNitty...
Yeah, this didn't happen overnight. They could have given more warning.
"We observed a strong inverse association between coffee consumption and risk of lethal prostate cancer. The association appears to be related to non-caffeine components of coffee."

De-caff will do ya...
Difficulty in getting the materials to build a wooden structure to the disaster zone would make the concrete tent a better option in many cases.
Yes I think you did the right thing.
Interesting. I like your description of this. I specifically think that a problem with Facebook for this is the jokes that are still there. That is another good point. I hope the press for you guys talks about the advantages of Facebook.
If it weren't my own action causing it, it would be exactly like Sony stealing them.
I voted yes, but maybe it's because I haven't found a way to use it yet. I don't use it to hire or sell social media services, so to me, it's almost worthless.
Excellent exploration of alternatives to the old 'terminal' application. It would probably help for context to explore the Bell Labs 'BLIT' terminal and the Digital Equipment Corp VT340 (color graphic terminal) and the Tektronix 4010/4014/4064 terminals. These had capabilities that augumented the basic terminal stuff and made it prettier at least to use them.

The humorous thing for me is seeing the discussion which essentially devolves into creating a new windows type metaphor but with a lot of keyboard shortcuts.

It may sound pedantic but consider that the terminal is the terminal because terminals define a keyboard driven user interface. A user interface is a 'vocabulary' which describes actions. Its vocabulary scales from a communication channel that is 300 baud to one which has multi-megabaud connectivity. You can create a different vocabulary (which is what the other terminals above did) and get additional features.

And you can create an entirely new vocabulary if you're willing to change the minimum connectivity channel bandwidth as well (I doubt TermKit would work well over 300 baud for example). There was some good work done on this in the 80's with 'visual shells' on the PC and of course there is a ton of work that IBM did in creating optimized terminal environments (with visuals no less) on 3270 terminals which were in many ways a pre-cursor to todays IDE tools, although perhaps more like Eclipse. Their environment which ran airline reservations was a good example of optimizing the vocabulary (key strokes) against the variety of tasks an agent might need to do.

So rather than calling this a graphical terminal replacement (which it isn't) calling it a visual UI which can be driven entirely by the keyboard might be better. I think that fundamentally the "thing" about terminals that everyone sort of 'gets' is that you don't have to use a mouse, you always know where your 'focus' is, and there are millions of key combinations which you can use to express certain actions. For some, that is simply 'living in emacs' for others it could be something like this.
Rudy,

I think what your team is doing is very noble. You are absolutely correct, Facebook was not tailored to this kind of activity. We need a real platform to memorialize others and - more importantly to the average user - a place where we can memorialize OURSELVES. Mortality is a big issue and we all want to be preserved for eternity in a positive light. Facebook does not give us control over this postmortem public image.

As others have pointed out, 1000memories sits outside of mainstream networks. It asks users to go out of their way to memorialize and interact with the deceased on a platform beyond their daily traffic. Perhaps not a barrier to entry issue, my guess is that 1000memories has a retention issue. How do you keep people coming back after their first visit?

Is there a way 1000memories could better tie in social media and their networks? An obviously example would be to pull a user's Twitter feed into the mix of memories. Family and friends could rank the most memorable tweets and promote certain aspects of the deceased's published life. The same concept applies to blogs, Flickr photos, and Facebook updates.

To win social media integration, the deceased party would need to give 1000memories permission to connect with social media accounts pre-passing and regulate the content that can be shared. 1000memories could market to the living to set up an account that "gives you control of the memories you leave behind." A "will" for postmortem digital image.

I would use a service that offered me the ability to control my image postmortem.
Regarding liking vim, I have no issue with typing "edit foobar.txt" and having a local MacVim open up :)

Most of what TermKit is doing doesn't immediately appeal to me (as a longtime shell junkie of sorts), but one thing I would love to have in a terminal is tooltips, or popups of some sort. For example, say I get a 40 line stack trace, I'd like to just see one line (the exception, where it was thrown from) but have the option to learn more by clicking on a line in the terminal. Basically how exceptions are reported in the browser in Django or Rails, but in the terminal.
Show HN:  Testing is hard - I make it easier
Keep it.
MacroSolve Joins Lodsys in Suing Mobile App Developers
There's no way a screen the size of the iPad is going to fit in your pocket in the next 10-20 years. Not because it can't fold, but because it weights a pound and a half. The battery alone is 5+ ounces, more than the entire weight of an iPhone.

Dedicated tablets are here to stay.
Office 365 across the Mac, Safari and iPhones
The point of functional data structures is that if you modify, you don't copy the whole structure, you only copy the path to the things that changed.

A simple example would be parsing a sequence of characters and storing that in a linked list. When you get an additional character you don't destructively modify the list, instead you create a new list node that points to the existing list.

def process(char, state):
return Node(char, state)

The process function takes a character and a state, and returns a new state. The old state is still usable, as nothing was mutated. On the other hand no large data structure had to be copied.

Your method is probably more efficient. Because you don't need access to all historical versions simultaneously, you only have to keep a stack of undo operations. So you only have O(1) slowdown per operation. With functional data structures you have in the worst case a O(log n) slowdown per operation.

For example if you implement a bit vector, then update and lookup can both be O(log n), e.g. a red-black tree. If you want update to be O(1) then lookup becomes O(n), e.g. a linked list. If you want lookup to be O(1) then update becomes O(n), e.g. copying the entire vector on update.

(please correct me if I'm wrong and if you can do better than O(n) for those cases)
Is it prognostication day already? I dissent.

I call the future is: Your world in your phone sized device backed by the cloud, with the option to use anonymous, mindless larger displays when in close proximity. (Bonus good future if I can also leap to a processor in an anonymous proximate device for speed.)

EOM

Reasoning: Producing enough light for a larger display requires power, requires mass, interferes with the light weight of the phone. Decouple the display and the phone. Ditto for CPU power and storage.
Free-Floating Planets May be More Common Than Stars
Android fragmentation does not undermine security
I'm saying today or the immediate future.

What you'd need to replace the home computer, at the minimum, would be support for 'docking' the device into a larger display and keyboard, which suggests mouse (to avoid gorilla-arm) and implies apps that can detect that mode switch and alter themselves accordingly.

If you've tried to use keyboards on current tablet software designed for touch, you've seen that they're as ill-supported as touch is on software designed for kb/m. Until the OS and apps can provide reliable navigation and control from the keyboard (and optional mouse), they're a non-feature. They're no closer to popular consumer adoption than the last round of Windows-based tablets.

Short of that mode switch, there are simply too many times when the ergonomics of tablets are inappropriate or less desirable. And an older PC (that people already own) will be the logical choice for those tasks.

And you'd also need a better printing solution. As much as I personally hate printing, schools and business are moving very slowly on that front and a lot of personal PC use revolves around creating documents to be printed. And the current solutions aren't there for the average family.
Do Musicians Have Better Brains?
GroupTalent - Hire Effective Teams. Not Individuals.
We built GroupTalent based on our realization that we were most effective when working together as a team. We decided to build a community that could promote software teams and expose them to new opportunities. In terms of being an X for Y, in its current state, GroupTalent is an AngelList for dev teams and companies. Please give us some feedback!
Thanks! You nailed the difficulty right on the head.
ARM: Intel 3D Chip Technology Is Irrelevant Today
Then you misunderstood my point, backtracking and keeping history with persistent data structures is very cheap.
Automation in a service like this is key because, well, you're dead and you can't do anything about it.

Facebook should consider features the user can control that take effect upon death. A user would have to have a certain level of foresight about their mortality, but i think that could have a very positive effect.
My point being the bay area is great to live regardless and you talk about your business doing great, you should be in silicon valley. (2 birds one stone.)

I know your just looking for locations, but your life is apart of business and your location is key. Why not improve both at the same time. :)
We built GroupTalent based on our realization that we were most effective when working together as a team. We decided to build a community that could promote software teams and expose them to new opportunities. In terms of being an X for Y, in its current state, GroupTalent is an AngelList for dev teams and companies. Please give us some feedback!
i do web/email hosting and am in a similar situation with my customer domains. however, i'm an opensrs reseller, so i usually do the actual domain registration and renewal for my customers as their registrar. if customers don't want to transfer their domains to me, i tell them they're responsible for renewing them (which i use as a selling point for why they should transfer them to me).

for any domains/certs that require manual renewal on my part, my billing system (plug: http://corduroysite.com/) is set to invoice the customers for these a month or two in advance because it's entered as a yearly recurring service. if they pay the invoice, i see it and do the renewal manually (or at least verify that the domain is set to auto-renew with opensrs). if they don't pay the invoice, the domain doesn't get renewed. this is actually beneficial because sometimes customers want to let some domains go, so they will contact me and tell me to let them expire before the auto-renew date comes up.

anyway, as for your product, your free package seems like it would be useful for your target market (web developers managing a few domains). however, anyone with more than 15 domains would probably have a billing system or domain reseller account that manages all of this for them. for a large company with hundreds of domains needing your more expensive packages, i can't really see them manually importing and deleting lists of domains as customers come and go, especially since there is no integration with their billing system.

my point being, the product may get a lot of free accounts but not many paid accounts. perhaps you should look into integration with established billing/invoicing systems?
Ask HN: Is Music Bad For Concentration?
As a homeschooling dad I am trying to weigh the pros and cons for allowing the kids to listen to music while working. Any thoughts?
The Problem with Team Building Initiatives
Slimgems, The New Kid In Ruby Package Management Land
Here's what gives:

1) The only really valuable information [1] you have on PSN is your credit card information.

2) While Sony said that the credit card information might have been stolen too, so far it appears that it hasn't been compromised.

3) The primary use most people have for PSN is playing games online with other people. Security isn't such a big deal there. [2]

4) Those who purchase games and DLC using PlayStation Store can always choose not to use their credit card for that.

Bottom line? As long as the user's credit card info isn't compromised, he or she will probably care about their PSN security as much as, for example, having their Goodreads account hacked: it would be an annoyance, but not the end of the world.

[1] Trophies and stuff like that have their own value, but most people value their money a lot more than their PSN trophies.

[2] Again, it's not a big deal compared to, for example, having your wallet stolen.
I love the idea. But as someone who also loves vim, to hear that your vision of a new terminal excludes a tool as powerful and expressive as vim makes me sad, because it means that apparently I won't be able to benefit from this new terminal. I'll watch with interest, however.
Great post ben i'm amazed this can happen with such ease.
Good idea, but its a new blog without any existing members
You can edit the user prompt[1] in most shells as well as the window title[2] in xterm. There's also a command-line editing mode in bash[3].

[1] http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/howtos/Bash-Prompt/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO-2.html
[2] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Xterm-Title-3.html
[3] http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-vi-editing-mode-cheat-sheet/
Project goal #3 is telling. Let the drama commence.
I do think however that the spirit of gleeful copyright subversion is at odds with the desire to read great journalism.

I think you're mistaken about that. I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect copyright is a (mostly) obsolete concept, and that gleeful copyright subverters are just the people who are already living in the future.

A lot of musicians have already given up on the idea of making money from selling recorded music, and expect to make it from concerts instead. I suspect we will see similar displacements in writing.
I also know very little about concrete but I would expect that this construction varies slightly from traditional concrete due to the water being sprayed on the outer surface, rather than being part of the mixture. I could be wrong though.
I'm glad your experiences have been so plush. In my past as a graphic designer (this doesn't happen anymore in web development, mind you), I've been hired and then let go in the span of a few months, due to cuts and layoffs. Maybe I'm burned and a bit cynical, but the lesson I've taken away is that business is business.
> They remain essential tools for many programmers and system administrators.

So maybe TermKit isn't the app for them.

> However, it must be fully backwards compatible with the full unix toolchain to be useful.

"Must"? If this app does something useful for you, great. If not, that's fine too. Every app doesn't need to be used by every person.
Google: Android security flaw now being fixed for all users
Facebook Launches E-mail - The New Facebook Messages
Warning only helps so much when you're required to reauthenticate users for permissions they already granted.
As far as I can tell you have to rewrite all your applications to use this. So he's not really advocating "a cool new terminal," he's advocating a "new Unix programming toolset, with accompanying terminal, to replace the BSD/GNU tools." This is great, and I wish you all the best of luck, but it looks like you're just rewriting Applescript.

Also, the reason Unix tools don't toss around JSON/XML/MIME is for sheer simplicity. It's a zen thing, something you OSX guys wouldn't understand.

Catting a png and getting a picture is nice though.
Those Eccentric Chessplayers:

http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/7378/eccent.htm
I think this is a great idea! Facebook could use this functionality.

You can declare certain people on Facebook "family members." Perhaps you could assign those people certain permissions to control your profile in specific use cases, like death.
Although I haven't pursued any offers i've gotten some nice leads for positions with saleforce, amazon kindle, amazon web services, disney interactive, blackberry, bigfish games, netflix and a couple of smaller names via linkedin.

So i find it useful in that sense. The leads are often of a higher quality (actual hire managers, in-house hr) than what I get from email and head hunter voice messages.

I was very close to nabbing a book deal with packt through the service as well.
Bing Search Engine Optimization
:) If I had my way this comment would be closer to the top. Not many grammar-based parsing systems can claim raw DNS parsing.
Code First Development in Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1
This comment thread, both here and on the blog post, is the best example of stop energy being directed at forward motion I've seen in a long, long time:

http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy

Kudos to unconed for doing something remarkable. I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Has anyone actually been successful following a similar path? Has the author actually read all these books? This is just a list of books on programming languages and tools. Why am I learning Ruby and Python? Why am I avoiding relational database servers and learning SQLite? Nothing is explained.
Google Rolling Out Server-Side Fix to Android Authentication Flaw
I think it really depends on both the music and the person. For me personally, I can only really concentrate with music on, preferably on headphones. This way I can really close down from stuff happening around me. On the other hand, if the music is very lyrics-based, I'll usually start focussing on that instead.

So for me, the amount of lyrics in the music I listen at a given moment is inversely proportional to the level of concentration I need ;)
maybe it's because I haven't found a way to use it yet

For this same reason, I'm leaning towards "No" or abstention.
ComicNerd is a Best-in-Class Reader for Mac