skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that "most folks" don't recognize the poor security isn't very relevant; it's still poor security. And supposing most people do use the same password for most or all websites they visit, that makes it even more important that sites don't store their passwords in cleartext or in a reversible manner.
As one of the (apparently rare) programmers-sans-ideas, I look forward to such a post.
Our small company linked free open source Asterisk servers in US, Philippines, and India (10-100 people per location). It's doable, but has a significant learning curve. I'd recommend hiring a professional to help you set it up and train your IT staff.

If you want to pay for a higher end option, Avaya is a common choice. They power many companies (including huge call centers) all over the world.
It's a good point, and this probably should never be used in production. If it is, it would be more like the "pole" example, which doesn't redraw except for user interaction. In that case, it won't max out your CPU.
Google is essentially comparing WebP to JPEG right now like you would compare PDF to plain-text. They have a proof of concept ("look, the text appears on the screen!") that has a smaller file size but lacks any actual features. My concern is that once they implement all the features required of a mature image format (alpha, color modes, etc), size will be on par with another existing format.
I blame the French: http://bit.ly/hjxHZQ
I almost entirely agree, the difference is minimal (especially if a support agent can easily recover it, that's a pretty low bar). Encrypting passwords and keeping the key in an offline (or hardware-protected), highly secure location helps manage your risk but "don't ever do it" should still be standard response when considering a system which lets you recover passwords.

I can think of two situations where design dictates you need passwords to be recoverable, but even though they exist you can (and I do :)) argue the design is wrong:

- Online aggregators like Mint/Yodlee/etc. that pass through your credentials and use screen scraping to get your data. Obviously a faulty design but in the financial aggregator case it's kind of your only choice and many customers are willing to accept the tradeoff.

- I've heard policy enforcement (e.g. "Your current password must not contain any of your N previous passwords and must meet [set of strength criteria]") used as an excuse but I don't really buy it. Not having access to the original password limits your choices for future policy enforcement (to what you could derive from the password when first set) but with a little foresight and extra work you can do fine just with hashes.
Interactive map of U.S. pedestrian fatalities (2001-2009)
More importantly, they can only gain access to the service by changing the password, thus giving away the fact that something has happened.
Programming language with customizable syntax
When we're talking about passwords stored "encrypted" on customer-exposed applications, I agree.

When we're talking about passwords "vaulted" in non-exposed systems used for customer support, I have a harder time getting upset about it. I don't like systems that work this way, but I see the support/security tradeoff and it's a valid one.

It is likely but not certain that the site in question here did not go through the trouble of setting up a non-exposed secure password vault system for customer support people to use under supervision. Probably they do just store passwords in a column somewhere. But you don't know for sure whether they do.

Nobody needs rainbow tables to crack passwords.

http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
That book is probably the most significant reason I'm a tech entrepreneur today. It also partially funded my first startup, indirectly. I researched and ended up investing in Data General, because of the book. It was acquired by EMC about a year after I invested, and I made a very nice profit. That, plus Netbank and Sano (acquired by Elan) added up to the $30k, or so, that I used to start my first company.

So, a pretty good book, all around. West, and the rest of the Data General crew, were heroes to me during my entrepreneurial formative years.
Is it really that hard to believe? If you're a really plugged in technophile you'd never make that mistake, but is the average person really that aware of what a "Galaxy Tab" is, who makes it, and how it differs from one of those "iPads"?

We already have prominent news services mis-identifying Samsung phones as iPhones[1], so it's not hard to believe that people even less plugged in are having a harder time of distinguishing these products.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/opinions/outloo...
Groupon isn't reaching people like Zynga, Facebook, and LinkedIn can. Those three sites are, at their core, web-based through the entire business.

Groupon requires sales people linking with local businesses to offer coupons. Groupon cannot scale like those other companies. Anyone in Uganda can access Facebook by just going to Facebook.com, logging in, and start finding people. The same people in Uganda can look at the Groupon site, but they'd get no use out of it because the coupons aren't local.
the barrier of entry to derivatives is simply knowing what they are, which thankfully is often high enough for most people not to face a margin call and lose everything
"Quicksearches" in Firefox work exactly like that, too.
FYI: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile...
VF is in fact currently a bastion of serious long-form narrative journalism. It's hard to take seriously if you have the paper copy stinking up your hands with perfume samples, but it's a serious publication.
When the economy picks up again it will likely go on for a while. Zynga built a multi-billion dollar business in a recession.

I wouldn't go short on either of those stocks, especially considering how much demand there is in the public markets for something new. We are witnessing a 5-year backlog of public listings
Or the Obama presidency.
The only innovation zynga did was changing the logos of other games (Farmville=Farm town, mafia wars=mobwars, cafe world=restaurant city, it's as if there's mass brain damage in that company and they can't come up with a single original idea). They are also among the most aggressive game euthanizers: they have shut down all their games that did not generate tons of cash, much to the chagrin of their players.

Let's not forget they have an exclusive agreement with facebook, the terms of which we don't know; not a very fair advantage.

Also, zynga and old gaming houses have different audiences, so i 'm not sure they're killing anyone
New here, are you? :)
And an fyi, tigerdirect.com does this too. I don't know if it's reversible or plain text, but I'd still prefer to reset my password on the site rather than it being sent back to me.
The internets don't provide much information for doctors to go off of. Lots of people who want to sell them mutual privacy agreements, lawyers that say "you should do it!", but nothing with any real facts about them.

Maybe EFF could do some SEO efforts to get on google's front page talking about what they really mean to balance everybody trying to sell them.
I think you cannot create something of Great value without being naughty and breaking rules. You are just understanding it wrong. Someone at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and other cos had to say "F the portals and the homepage filled with links", "F ads that aren't relevant to the user", "F proprietary software, we are going to make it open source", "F Myspace, I am going to make something clean and no user will be allowed to change the background", "F FTPing, emailing files, and copying files in my USB, I am going to make a box where you can just drop things", "F mile-long blog posts, we are going to limit it to 140 char. Want more? Though luck"... That's naughty, that's breaking the rules, and guess what? It's all good.
That is a great question - we actually didn't consider using elastic search, we went with Solr because we use it for Octopart and are experienced with it so it made developing ThriftDB easier. We're evaluating other options now and will have a look.
I currently have a 30" + 20" setup and a 27" at home. I find that I prefer the two screen setup even though 95% of my attention is on the primary screen. It's nice having "unimportant" stuff pushed off to the secondary screen (Skype, music, other chat stuff, etc.) and maintaining the feeling they're "there" physically but not in my face. It's mostly a psychological thing for me but that's still important.

I have found, and find, portrait mode to be maddening on all screens on which I've tried it but I'm fussy over visuals. Subpixel text rendering works best with the pixel shape in landscape and has somewhat less fidelity in portrait. As a UI developer, this might be even more annoying to you since what you see won't reflect what the majority of your audience is seeing (though it rarely does, to be fair).
NASA to abandon Spirit Mars Rover
I see most of "Make something people want" but none of "Relentlessly Resourceful". If I were making a YC T-shirt that's what I would put on it.
True - but a sales office is all they have to add. There's no shipping of inventory that Apple or Honda have to deal with.
I really miss having a 2x3 grid of desktops.
No worries, that looks interesting, although I don't see the source code anywhere.
I'm struggling to see how that would have helped this person. The VF story is in fact not a hit piece, and involved what appears to be a multi-day interview. The audio recording required to shoot down the tiny fraction of this story Langner objects to would be very boring listening indeed --- because, of course, you'd have to trawl the whole thing to verify that he didn't crack wise about California blondes or D&G shoes.
Even if there is 2-way encryption involved, I don't find that an acceptable means of password storage. If the original password is retrievable by anything other than painful (hopefully infeasible) brute-force means, it's bad.
>Alex3917: The vast majority of doctors can't even name a single recent finding in their own field, let alone the most important ones.

I guess what you are saying is that it's important to support one's opinion with peer-reviewed research, rather than being overly reliant on personal experience.

A noble goal. I'm assuming that because this is important to you, you have done the same. Could you please cite your sources for the above statement?

Or is this an extremely clever way of proving the point that perhaps physicians really are justified in worrying about unfounded negative opinions on the internet?
Epic cover letter
Does Google Shopping spell the end for shopping comparison sites?
Using the bernoulli effect to walk on walls
Wow! Seems to be working for them:

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23theheist

Would be interesting to see the impact on their sales.
Adding Lambda Expressions to Forth [pdf]
United Nations treaty should make mountain climbing in the death zone illegal, in my opinion.
I was interested to know if someone other than Passpack uses the "Big Friend" approach to improve the security. Do you know other examples?
Out of the ~20 interviews I have witnessed and seen written up NONE of them where completely accurate. And I am not talking about simple mistakes, but deliberately spicing things up.
Remote military bases. Running those trucks with jerry-cans of diesel is expensive and sometimes perilous. A rectenna array for military purposes could be concealed in a specially constructed tent and be of much smaller dimensions than a solar photovoltaic array of similar power.
What I mean by transformation is that we transform movies into games (Voice Over videos) by muting some dialog lines. That changes the meaning of the work. It's not entertainment anymore. No one will watch movie with half dialog lines muted.

The only thing students can do with DVD is to watch it (passive entertainment).

In our case students learn dialog lines and than perform them with the help of Voice Over videos (active learning).

I think that we create a new market for people with a specific need. When people pay for access to Voice Over videos they will pay because they want to overcome Anxiety, not because they want to see movie for entertainment.

Thats how I see it. May be I wrong
It's got a long way to go to catch up, though.

Duke Nukem Forever was in development before Half Life 1 came out. I'm going to miss not having it. It's like finding out that Samuel Beckett has written a sequel to Waiting for Godot. It just kinda spoils the whole thing.

ACT 1, Scene I

(Enter Vladimir, Estragon, Godot)
No android app? Boo :(
The thrudb author (https://github.com/tjake) is working on Cassandra now.
>narrator: "Most doctors don't give a damn. They just follow exact rigid procedure. If someone dies they can exonerate themselves in front of any medical review board that bothers to investigate. They can then send the patient off to the morgue and go play golf on the weekend. Happens all the time."

Physicians are required to provide treatment within the standard of care. I'm not sure if that's the "exact rigid procedure" that you are referring to, but I would note that this requirement is imposed by the legal system.

Also, it really makes me sad to hear that you think that doctors don't care about their patients that die. I am a physician, and I can tell you (anecdotally) that doctors I have known who lose patients don't take it lightly. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I would ask you to back up such a broad and accusatory statement with some evidence.
Do we really need another "ZOMGWTFBBQ! I started a blog and made real money on it!" article? Is there anything new here? I did not find it if there was.
Percentile Feedback and Productivity (and a graph that cares)
I'm not saying that they're a paragon of virtue or anything, but if you don't have respect for Zynga's abilities then you're missing some really valuable insights. Sure, they "ripped off" the idea for almost every game they've ever made, but as many commenters here love to point out, it's not just the idea that matters, but the execution (setting aside for now the point that everyone steals ideas - remember when those jerks at Google "ripped off" the idea of a search engine?).

Zynga didn't just make another farm game, they used their familiarity with FB's viral channels to make it the biggest silly little farm game on the platform. Then they turned around and used that audience as a springboard for a number of other games that, while derivative, were simply the strongest distillations of their respective types.

I get it, everyone loves to hate Zynga, but the fact is that they are really good at what they do, and lots of people out there enjoy their games.
Theoretical Node.js Real time Performance
I agree. Up above it was pointed out that it's bad because a) people use the same passwords across sites, and b) by not allowing peeking at a password, bad employees are forced to use mechanisms that are more likely to create audit trails, like mechanisms that change a password in the database.
A partially related topic(maybe many of you already know): I was learning about minimizing logic expressions the other day, and I learned about the Karnaugh Map, which uses Gray code for its axes. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map
Go public before people get bored with social networking as a whole! I think that's what we are seeing now -- people actually seeing a slowdown in the explosive segment.
I did notice Opera shows on Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch but on clicking on it, it will show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXX

So they leave out the the request parameters and the protocol to dumb it down.
> Passwords that can be decrypted reliably are isomorphic to passwords stored in plaintext.

This is absolutely correct, and I feel some readers may not exactly understand it. It would be one thing if only you had the key to decrypt the password (as is the case for example when you sync your browser data in Google Chrome). When the same people have access to both your encrypted password and the key to decrypt it, your password is only as secure as your confidence in the company's policies and employees' integrity.

Also, as a side note I should mention that even if Newegg was securely storing your encrypted password and key, they forfeit that when they email it to you in plaintext.
Moving periods around inside of a direct quote is not the truth.
I use 27"+20" at home and 24"+20" at work. I can say for sure having two monitors feels much better - I can dedicate one monitor to terminals and other for web and documentation. Having two also helps in quickly maximizing a documentation window in one monitor without obstructing the main working area (terminals) for me. I used these monitors in landscape mode and end up splitting the width of the screen into two or three terminals. 27" monitor felt huge at the beginning, but was pretty awesome once I figured out windows placement which works for me.
Apple acknowledges Mac Defender malware, promises update
A review of peer-to-peer projects addressing Freedom on the Internet
the idea of storing code in DB isn't new. there are couple "exotic" system which do it, SAP R/3 being one of them.
It's definitely possible that they're storing the passwords using reversible encryption. However:

1) In my experience, it's often harder to set your app up to use reversible encryption instead of hashes, especially if you're using an existing authentication library. In a case like this, I would assume the path of least resistance is more likely.

2) Storing passwords as reversible encryption is almost as bad, as the person who compromises your security would likely have access to your application code (and therefore the key to decrypt the passwords), and the negligible benefits of being able to retrieve passwords are not usually worth the potential liability.
Hehe, who here got through Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis?
Life is too short to build stuff you don't enjoy building.
With autocompletion it will send every part while you type to the search-engine: p, po, por, porn, porns, pornsi, pornsit, pornsite, pornsite., pornsite.c ohhh, the user meant a URL, I'll stop sending it to the searchengine provider.
"'What he told them was that if you win at this level, then your reward is that you get to play again at the next level, but guess what: The next level is more difficult,' said Don McDougall of Palo Alto, Calif., a former vice president of technical products at Data General."

That's great insight into how to motivate people to do their best.

I read the book The Soul of a New Machine many years ago, but already long enough after it was published that the technology sounded a bit primitive. It was a grippingly good read, a glimpse into how different personalities mesh to solve a tough technical problem.
The video looks a little bit like the open compute project video from facebook .

Isn't pumping so much water through the pipes less efficient compared to facebooks method of cooling air down by spraying the water ?

See fb method at http://livestre.am/wBjp
Do you know what discoverability is ? Really how do users know ? It has to be obvious or users won't use it/understand or even discover it.
Ok, I will test it this Saturday and report.
Skecher  shoes
I am one of these purgatory accounts in WA too. It's amazing to me, because their acquisition of Seafirst occured over 25 years ago. You'd think they could have sorted out the IT merger issues since then :P
I actually stumbled into thrudb a few months ago after we had already written v1. We talked to some people at Disrupt that are doing similar things with search and Thrift as well.
As an indie fb game developer, i 've been following zynga over the years. Their spam tactics were the reason that facebook started changing their platform policies every month. Zynga took advantage of the fact that facebook at the time was not enforcing its app policies (remember forced invites?) so they maxed out their reach by using shady tricks and consistently breaking or bending the ToS. I remember me and other devs complaining to facebook for months and nothing was ever done. When facebook started limiting viral channels, zynga was already too big to be touched.

In the process, they destroyed many indie developers and the fear of being wiped by zynga is still everpresent. Personally, i find it hard to love anything about them, even after years. I 'm not jealous of them or their profits, but i find it hard to wish them "good luck". Maybe if they had started their own social gaming network i'd give them some credit. Zynga is still a parasite on facebook.

Here is a relevant answer from a former facebook engineer: http://www.quora.com/Will-Zynga-leave-Facebook

Here's them posting fake reviews of their games: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=41577
The Stanford Facebook Class (2007)
Damn,

I had the opportunity to use some Data General Machines in the 1980s..fine machines, reliable, etc...

I am the only older one here that remembers using the machines?
I do find it hard to believe. At various times, I've found it very difficult to tell the difference between economy sedans made by Hundai, Toyota and Honda. Yet I have a very difficult time believing that people purchase one without knowing the manufacturing brand.

I have experienced one instance of someone using the term iPhone when they wanted to say smart phone. But after talking for just a minute or two it was clear they wanted advice on what phone to get be it a Motorola, LG, Apple, etc. It seems likely that's just due to apple's heavy advertising campaigns.
This is generally good advice, but I'd point out two things:

1) It's only $200. Even the most conservative investors will often put aside 5% or 10% of their portfolio for active investing.

2) 10 years ago, the S&P 500 was around $125 a share, and is now about $130. If we have another decade like that, $200 invested in the S&P 500 10 years ago will be a whopping $216 after being invested 20 years -- barely keeping ahead of inflation.
Bringing a CPU up to run a program is quite a technical challenge.

One of these years I'd like to create a mini Lisp multi-threaded kernel.
Sony hacked yet again
The major problem with this is that URLs are currently used for one very important thing, for which there is no widespread alternative: showing the "owning entity" of the site you're visiting. In Internet terms, your domain name is your identity - in a very real way, Facebook's identity is "facebook.com" more than it is "Facebook Inc.".

SSL verifies the hostname of the site you're connecting to, so for SSL to be any use at all, the hostname has to be meaningful and visible.

(I do think you could get away with hiding everything but the domain name and/or hostname by default - the signal-to-noise ratio in the rest of the URL is pretty low anyway).