skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The denominator in NYC is very high, so poorly on that metric. It might be closer (though I suspect not particularly close) if you compared VC$/square foot, or VC$/engineer.

All these metrics are but approximations of the impossible-to-measure VC$ available/VC$ sought number that actually matters to startups. I suppose we could compare VC$/GDP$, to get some idea of how much of a nation's economy is based on startups.
What BRIC alliances?

BRIC countries are just clumped together for being developing economies that are going through similar experiences, but it is far from being a political-economic group.

Quite the opposite, actually.
UBS: Timing of Nokia Settlement Favorable to Apple
Bundler didn't solve the Rake issue because by default, Rails doesn't put rake in the bundle :)

Another thing to learn.
Who said that it's supposed to help businesses that are in trouble? They are essentially a marketing company that sells small businesses lots of foot traffic...
I'm guessing it would make brute forcing about 40 times easier.
Thats exactly what we do! Basically run our own Groupons. Send out an email with a link to a hidden page on our site that will be up for a week. We generally do it in the winter just before Christmas. Lots of sales as gifts, and since it's winter they will wait a few months to jump which will raise breakage, and hence the margin.
I suspect Solar Designer wrote the implementation for John the Ripper with the goal of cracking passwords, not validating them properly. For this purpose, slightly-truncated hashes should work just as well (maybe slightly better).

If Openwall and py-bcrypt are using JtR code for actually validating them, that's a questionable bit of software engineering. JtR may not be doing the same type of input validation that one would want in your authentication code. More evidence for this suspicion is that the input length disparity the blogger Rondam describes.
I thought the conventional wisdom about weightlifting was short, intense workouts, and if you could do 30 minutes or more of it, it's not as intense as it should be. I mean, 3 sets of eight is pretty quick, and there are only so many muscle groups you can work that don't overlap.

I mean, nobody is arguing that you shouldn't also lift; more muscle mass means more calories burned no matter what your activity level. But I think lifting and cardio is going to be more effective than just lifting alone.
> Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors?

We have that: every medical drama on TV, Patch Adams, Awakenings, etc. Not to mention the massive cultural esteem associated with the medical profession.

> How about an "Intro to Medicine" where we do fun stuff like play Operation and dress up in scrubs?

Playing Operation and dressing up in scrubs is intro to medicine. By the time you're in high school, you have a mental image of what a doctor does and roughly what the job entails.

Most people on Earth have zero concept of what programmers do. I've had family members literally ask me if I type ones and zeroes all day. (A: yes. You should have seen their eyes.) People know that we sit in front of a computer. Beyond that... nothing. They don't have any of what's on screen much less what's in our heads. With mathematicians people at least think about whiteboards and equations.

So, yeah, I don't see any harm in a little "Hey, here's a fun intro to what programming is."
you raise a bunch of economic issues, but the poster to which i replied simply stated that there was "no where else to go", which is absurd

the rest of your points are dubious. your point B) has been proven false since the launch of the space station...this was one of its apparently initial goals, zero-g bioresearch...except that ended up being replaced with simulating everything in computers with bioinformatics on earth much more easily

C) also has no meaning as we could provide 100% of our solar needs by simply covering a part of any of our major deserts with solar thermal.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/surface-area-requ...

D) maybe, but, for a contrived example, if gold is $5000 an ounce, you have to bring it back from mars for less than $5000 an ounce or its a wash

E) completely bogus, no humans could survive long term with constant support from earth, this has been beaten to death
Show HN: Store sessions directly in the cookie when using Node.js + Connect
I can assure you, a tandem has an enormous variable cost. It costs the business ~$80 in cash to put the tandem in the air. This does not include fixed costs such as office staff labor, marketing, the lights, building rent, equipment maintenance and purchase costs, etc.
"But if I said that chaos and information theoretic arguments prevent us from making any predictions, I'd rightly be laughed off the stage."

"Information theory bounds our ability to predict" is not the same as "Information theory prevents us from giving any predictions". You could predict the temperature of "the Earth" (for some suitable definition) within some bounds, but if you tried to do it to within a tenth of a degree Celsius for a hundred years you would continue to encounter difficulty... rather more than you have right now, actually, I'm quite confident the Sun's Lyapunov constant will strip bits from you much faster than Earth's current climate does.

Also, you're engaging in a bit of tautology without realizing it. The entire concept of "forcing" is one divorced from a chaos-informed concept of weather, it's part of the reason I really don't think they understand chaos. The "forcings" are themselves subject to the prediction problem, so you may be able to predict what the system will do immediately after the application of them, but you don't know what will happen later. In Earth's specific example, what if the hotter climate ends up triggering Yellowstone? Or that methane clathate catastrophe? Or something entirely unexpected? Much more realistically, what if the "forcings" tend to cancel themselves out over longer times? There's been a couple of good papers that suggest that all the water on Earth (oceans, etc) are very, very strongly effecting the climate by virtue of cloud production in the tropics such that it is extremely strongly forcing the climate to look the way it does now, and all your "forcings" may be nothing next to it. Or that may be totally wrong. By the time you're done caveating "forcings" in light of what a chaotic system can do, they aren't a very useful approach to the problem.
Productivity and Continuous Improvement - Measurement makes it happen
> While some degree of human control could make up for heterostatic forces, a swing too far in either direction would quickly exceed our ability to compensate.

Exactly. That's why I'm suggesting that the "not worse" solution could be to artificially heat up the earth to the actual temperature for every latitude. Politics aside, a different temperature would probably disturb the current equilibrium and potentially cause some side-effects worse than the suspected mini ice-age.
There are industry "computer scientists." Your definition should simply be "someone who does research in computer science."
First off, the global warming debate is not just about temperatures. It is also about resource use, pollution, waste, contamination of environments, etc.

Secondly, the effect of this 'mini ice age' will last a scant 10 or so years. Call me crazy but it doesn't make sense to burn more fossil fuels and continue to cause potentially unrepairable harm to our environment to optimize for a period of 10 years of relatively cool temperatures.

If the scientific community agrees that warmer temperatures are in the planet's best interest, I'm sure there is a safer and more effective way to bring that about then the massive amount of pollution and CO2 we are currently pumping into the atmosphere.
I don't mind seeing these articles. We know exercise is good for us but it's not easy maintaining motivation and consistency. I'd like to see a follow-up on the psychology to accomplish that, how to hack your motivation to exercise.

One inspiration is Marc Jacob. He transformed his body, self-image, and business dramatically with fitness.
Why even have this page, then?
Did anyone else do that one without writing any code?
I second wunderfool's comment. Having driven from Richmond, Virginia, to Anchorage, Alaska, a couple of times, I can attest first-hand that most of North America is unoccupied, empty wildlands. And, don't tell me that I was confused by giant farms in Saskatchewan or something like that. I'm not counting them. Most of the land is simply empty and devoid of humans. (This fact got a little worrisome when it was night, I was low on gasoline, it was snowing, and I was still a good distance from the next "town" on the map.)
> You give them some Bitcoins. They transfer them to dollars

It should work just fine if they do the investments in Bitcoins.
The problem with WP was the way it was used in Gaza:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/israeli-army...
why do people throw these arguments around? i don't know of any nation whose scientists find any rapid climate change desirable. who are they? the notion of a polar thaw is tossed around as being desirable for canada as a shipping route....BUT this would decimate the living biosphere of 90% of canadians who live within 100 miles of the US border. i've never heard a serious canadian climate science talk about rapid climate change as desirable...nor any other
Lockpicks in my state in the US are permitted, except for having them with burglorious intent.

Same thing IMO.
great write-up! are you tracking how many groupons repeat after that first jump? i'd be curious what the repeat business looks like from this group
Do you have what it takes to build a great site? (Flowchart)
Taiwan Newspaper Pre-Announces 7-Inch iPad 3 – AllThingsD
You mean with smart guessing?
That's no fun!
I'm the py-bcrypt author. py-bcrypt is a thin wrapper around the original reference implementation of bcrypt from the authors of the paper describing it (Provos and Mazieres). The discrepancy in hash length is totally harmless (adding something like 2^-186 additional likelihood of collision) and was present in the reference implementation. I don't know exactly why the hash is slightly truncated, but I guess David or Niels thought that 60 character hashes were a more manageable length.

The author of this assinine blog post only contacted me a few days ago and obviously couldn't be bothered to wait for a response before proceeding to imply malicious intent for what is clearly a trivial difference between academic paper and practical implementation. I hope he retracts it.
Truly the comment of a mind many standard deviations more intelligent than the average smart person. [2]

[2] !!!
const char *kiddie_pr0n = { 0xff, 0xd8, 0xff, 0xe0,
0x00, 0x10, 0x4a, 0x46,
0x49, 0x46, 0x00, 0x01, ... };

and undoubtedly many other cases.
I didn't know what it was, and it looks like bajsejohannes didn't either.
That's funny. First they talk about cyberwar and now they want to smelt down their weapons?
do people really believe that rapid climate change will reveal some new mass of desirable farm land? maybe in 5000 years as the soils adapt to new climates, but not fast enough to feed a hungry planet.

there are some lands on the periphery of existing arable zones that might become desirable in the short term, but certainly there will be a net loss worldwide...local economies have grown around existing arable zones, you have to transplant all that too
http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news%2Cclojure

It has been stagnant for one year in Google Trends. It's progresson was eerily parallel with HN's in 2009 and the first half of 2010. At the time there were at least one Clojure story on the front page per day (fogus was a big perpetrator). Then people ran off of new things to show off and the mentions here became more rare. Roughly at that time, it stopped progressing in Google Trends.

Correlation ain't causation, but I wouldn't be surprised by a link here.

For comprison, here's Clojure vs. Common Lisp: http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp%2Cclojure
No, py-bcrypt uses the reference implementation from OpenBSD.
I find myself quite torn by this statement, because while I dont think hacking tools should be illegal, this is the exact same argument pro-gun people make, and i'm quite anti-gun (I'm from UK). Then again, in America drug paraphernalia is illegal but in the UK its not and i personally dont think you should be locked up for having a bong because theoretically you might only use it for tobacco.

Anyway, personally i'm quite adamant in the blanket statement that no software should be illegal.
no one. we do not have the technology to rapidly alter the climate. our current climate change is the result of thousands of years of population growth and industrialization. concepts for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere in short course are just that, concepts

mother nature is still in charge, and needs only shrug slightly with a temperature change of 10 degrees on average in either direction to eliminate humans and our society
Yawn: How Did Big Tech Companies Turn into Big Boring Banks?
This story is mostly bogus. There is no proven correlation between sunspots and terrestrial temperatures.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/06/14/science/AP-US-SCI...
How do you propose handling the abusers who download the app and then point their virtual fingers at some random person in the theater?
Fixed and unfixed versions, no?

I usually include a verbose, independent scheme string next to encrypted db columns, so a) data is self-documenting for future owners, providing fair detail to work around forward breakage/compatibility and b) have multiple methods living in the database during upgrades.
How high was cannibalization, i.e. existing customers using the Groupon deal instead of paying full price?
> Ruby core (“MRI”) itself has sunk an enormous amount of time into performance improvements in Ruby 1.9, going so far as to completely rewrite the core VM from scratch.

This isn't particularly accurate, my understanding is that what became the 1.9 VM was originally an external fork (or rewrite, I'm not clear on which) known as YARV, which was later integrated, but was not originally developed by the MRI team. As always feel free to tell me I'm a moron who has no idea what he's talking about.
have you tried explaining to your coworkers, family or casual friends that you don't like them enough to add them on facebook? there's a signifigant peer pressure barrier to not friending people.
AFF for $999, eh? Which DZ are you / where are you based?
It's All Software
LulzSec Topples EVE Online, Minecraft, League of Legends and other Servers
He wasn't making money directly on the Groupon deal, but on upsells: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2654788
I am in favor of doing with Mars as we wish. When Western Civilization had "first contact" with various "alien"[1] native societies around the world, most of the impact flowed from civilization to the "aliens". Civilization continued on and most of the alien societies became footnotes in history. Might makes right, and unless the Martian bacteria are crafting starships in their caves, I think we should take samples for scientific study and then open Mars to homesteaders. The Martian lifeforms have had just as long to do something productive with Mars as we have had with Earth. It is not our fault if they are still just bacteria.

[1] Meaning literally foreign.
I don't think it's that big of a deal. Considering the issue of wiping out a species, we do that all the time here on Earth (no that doesn't make it okay, but we do it all the time nevertheless, I don't think it's humanity's greatest crime). Considering the issue of wiping out an ET species, that makes me more worried for Great Filter concerns than about how we'll look back at ourselves in history. If there's life on Mars, or if there was life on Mars, either case is bad news for us.
Not that LulzSec has made sense up until now but why bother taking out online video games? I feel like that's alienating the population that would normally support or at least be indifferent about a group like LulzSec.
Has anyone looked at the length of the strings on OpenBSD?
Even before 1.x, Rails has been pretty easy to figure out, and looking at the old documentation, apparently well-documented. There were countless tutorial-style blog posts if the API docs weren't enough. The Ruby mailing list was inundated for a long time with talk about Rails, to the point that I had to make a filter.

I'm not by any means a Rails fan, and think that even now, it feels like a PHP framework. (I have a "competing" web framework that I wrote and use whenever I have the flexibility, if you can call it a competitor; it's not actively promoted and the users number in the low single digits). But they do deserve credit for making sure that it's easy to figure out how to get things done.
Coming from PHP Rails was a great way for me to learn best practices and get disciplined. Now that I have a good foundation I find myself using Sinatra plus whatever gems fit my small to medium projects. So it might not be that Rails is too heavy, it could be that some of these projects don't require the learning curve of Rails to be successful.
Bear in mind that the likelihood here is something like 2^-186
It wouldn't ever replace ERB anyway. HAML makes most things easier and terser at the cost of making a few things difficult or impossible. You still need to fall back to ERB occasionally, and it's also used outside of the views. All this makes for a bad default, especially for new users.

(I say this as someone who loves HAML and uses it almost exclusively).
"notwithstanding the couple hundred extra ppm of CO2"

if you're saying that ppm will be in the 600-700 range then humanity will be on an irreversible express train to extinction, so not much else in your post matters
This is basically two-factor authentication, without the first factor.

Isn't Google Authenticator supposed to have an open API so that any service can give you a secure seed and then let you use your mobile phone to login? https://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/
Who are you protecting the message from when you do this? Gmail? But they can just send the cleartext to the server before you click "encrypt it", and in fact they do (drafts).

Don't type stuff into a program you didn't write if you don't want the author to see it.
I don't see why a hacker would do this. They've already broken the law so this just increases their chances of being caught. If they wanted to be "nice", they could just have stolen fewer of the bitcoins.
I think the ubiquity of smartphones is a signifigant factor in facebook's decreasing engagement. SMS used to be useful mostly for coordinating once you were at a location/event, or for reminders. Now that you can send links to arbitrary content, it replaces in large part what most people used facebook for, with much faster response times for the most part.
Computer scientists get ahead in their careers by writing papers, not by writing software; they often prove things mathematically, but they're not particularly good at writing software that actually works.

For instance, I once got a C program from one of the machine learning masterminds of our time which crashed in the static initializer on 32 bit machines because it allocated a 4GB array that it never used. If you get some software from an academic research group there's a high probability that it won't build or won't run.

"Programmers" and "Developers" both write software for a living and I don't think it's worthwhile making a distinction. Lately I've been using "Web Developer" as a title for myself that more like a "Real Estate Developer" than a "Software Developer" but I'm afraid this is a non standard usage.
Yes, py-bcrypt produces identical hashes (it was intended to be compatible)
Or login using an SMS challenge/response code.
I often wish that DM would have replaced AR in Rails 3. Why Sequel?
yeah I thought it was base64 and that was annoying
Wasn't pre-caching already on Firefox? https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ

I remember this had its controversy quite some time ago. I'm glad Chrome is taking it seriously, but I wonder what happened with the old implementation.

(Note that the markup was <link rel="prefetch"> and now is <link rel="prerender">)
Some people are going to use both Windows AND Linux so that's how that's possible.
Doesn't work. My window manager manages my windows; they don't self-manage.
I'm clearly in the minority, but I'm not sure I would really be that attracted discounted sky-diving. If I ever try it, I want it to be with some delta force or SAS guy who is VERY well paid.
Ask HN: What % active users should I expect for my free web app
After launching a free web app about a year ago, it's sitting on around 5% active users (used it within last 2 days).

Although I could and plan to do more to increase uptake, should I take that percentage as fairly typical? or quite bad. It seems low to me. I would have thought more like 10%.
For Google. It funnels people to the App Store.
Um, we wouldn't be discussing climate change if that were the case.
One on One: Jack Tretton, Sony C.E.O. America
Cathay House Now Open at the Palms
There is a pretty easy philosophical workaround for your unease. Support banning doing things, not having things.
Full Disclosure: I am not a haml developer. I'm a haml user -- I only develop on sass.
Funny paradox.
Thanks for writing this up. Not much positive coming from the Groupon front of late. That said:

> In advance of the Groupon we raised our 10k price to $169 so that the discount percentage was higher.

I think most people assumed this was happening, but to have it said in plain English is a bit disturbing. It's deliberately deceiving the customer, and is accepted as a strategy. Is that sustainable?
Protip: if it floats, flies, or fucks, rent it.
Mobile version didn't kick in on iPad, which doesn't do CSS position: fixed, so the footer ends up hiding some of the text, and makes the site unreadable.
Disturbingly high. Repeat customers were also kind of scary.
How Javascript Loading Works – DOMContentLoaded and OnLoad
Funny that that quote should come from Alexander Hamilton, who was a leader in the federalist movement to consolidate and centralize power in the US government.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely - lord baron acton
New XBox scheduled for next year?
Idee's business model has little to do with TinEye. They're probably not very worried.
They can choose when and where to attack, but you have to defend everywhere all the time. I suspect we're in a situation where cost of being competent > probability of lulz * cost of remediation.
Kind of the whole point of digital currency is to evade tracking. A currency that is truly anonymous is more generally useful than one that isn't. The same features that make it easy to steal also make it easy to spend.

The US government won't let you leave with more than $10k in physical cash without "declaring" it, but declaring exposes you to likely theft by the government in the form of civil forfeiture or tax seizure, as does carrying it past TSA. Your bank won't let you wire-transfer large amounts without having to file a bunch of CTRs, again exposing you to potential legal liability. Making transactions in smaller amounts to avoid notice of the big amounts - even if you're doing so to avoid private thieves - is a federal crime called "structuring". Credit card companies solve some of the problem but can randomly "put a hold" on your funds without your consent.

Digital cash is trying to fill the role that cash used to fill before the War On Some Drugs made everything insane. Back when the government printed $500 bills and $1000 bills and it wasn't deemed "suspicious" to use them. In the modern age, digital cash promises to let us buy things around the world, "no questions asked", without banks and governments and other middlemen getting in the way.