skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would argue that it depends on the developer. Someone just starting out and not having a great deal of experience with algorithms, data structures, security, and the like will need to spend much more time focusing on those aspects. Their challenge isn't [only] writing elegant, maintainable code... it's getting their code to work at all at a reasonable level of performance.

Someone who has been writing software for a few decades will be starting out having already implicitly rejected bad algorithms, unmaintainable designs, unscalable data structures, and poor security practices. Years of development has given them an intuitive feel for the best starting point for an efficient, scalable, and secure design.

Not to mention that anybody with sufficient experience knows to figure out the overall design first before cracking open the code editor. As such, their focus should be on keeping their code elegant and maintainable because it will be built on top of a reasonably performant architecture. And when they discover areas which need greater efficiency, the ease of refactoring the well designed architecture is an inherent bonus.
It reminds me of that woman who chastised the free lemonade kids.

Sorry, I don't know the story behind this one, but would like to. Link?
"Real banks" are highly regulated and in the US are backed up by the US government. I don't know of too many other entities that can handle other people's assets with such low reserve requirements without being considered fraudulent. If there are any, I suspect they're heavily regulated or at least exempted as a speculative private fund.
They'd need to have withdrawn the bitcoins before the Mt. Gox database was rolled back. I haven't heard of anyone having done that.
That is the md5 digest of 'password'
10 essential tools and services for work-at-home IT pros
People that don't trust BTC, don't trust it because they don't understand it. Bitcoin isn't trying to compete with USD. It's a niche market for people interseted in trading anonymously and buying goods that they can't otherwise. Eventually it may grow, and that's fine.

What do you propose? A big PR push that BTC is safe? What if another exchange screws up? How are you going to explain that BTC itself is safe, but that third parties that interact with it require a seperate layer of trust?

I trust BTC. I use BTC. I don't trust Mt.Gox, so I'll go use another exchange. Again, none of this was the result of ANY flaw in BTC.

I mean, I guess bitcoin.org can run a banner "Mt.Gox's problems were unassociate with the safety of Bitcoin", but that's not going to help anything... and besides, there is still literally nothing that can ever be done about securing the currency of uninformed users.

If people want insured, centrally-authorized currencies, they need to go elsewhere. There's nothing to trust in BTC except the cryptographic soundness of SHA-whatever.
5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 = md5("password")

for those who don't know

Man, these programmers are fucking amateurs. It's a FUCKING TRADING PLATFORM.
When I met my girlfriend, I told her that her name was very mathematically pleasing. As a sign of my affection I figured out a formula that spells out her name from 1 to infinity. (Where A=1, B=2, ... Z=26)

f(x) = (13x+1)%26+((x+3)%4%3%2)*8

She said this was the most romantic thing a guy had ever done for her, but I think that says more about her ex-boyfriends than anything else. Anyway, it got me laid.
Hacker Follow - http://hackerfollow.com/
I'm cleaning up someone else's code that didn't contain a single comment. When finished, the cost for doing this will exceed the original project (we're talking man-months here).

After that, I'll worry about correctness and efficiency.

In the mainframe days, we used to have code reviews that forced programmers to structure things properly, or they'd hear about it in the reviews.
Climate scientists make a mockery of the peer-review process
To give some context, that financial exchange had a trading volume of less than 1000 dollars/day six months ago. http://i.imgur.com/HHlnd.png

The original author sold the site in March before things got really serious.
Aren't the salts stored within the hash $type$salt$hash
That book is old, and though still basically correct, there's much better ways to learn about the practice of developing secure systems. I recommend "Cryptography Engineering" by Ferguson, Schneier, Kohno which is a more modern descendant of Schneier's AC.
Buddha was the Worst Father
Several months I think assumed according to this: http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi

The article is 2 years old. There are botnets that I presume could do ~50 billion/sec now (Number pulled out of ass).
I'm not sure how I feel about this (although I don't use Gmail, so thankfully, it doesn't matter how I feel).

I like the fact that Google adds little touches that try to remind you that their employees are actual human beings.

I can be sympathetic to people who this might make uncomfortable (Father's Day is a pretty bad day for me), but I'm not sure how reasonable it is to try and shield yourself from things like this. I mean, presumably, you don't break down into tears every time a commercial airs advertising a "Father's Day" sale?

It just seems like a futile endeavor. It would be like if the color Yellow reminded you of some terrible memory. You'd kind of just have to deal with it.
Totally valid point, and everybody should be given a fair shake, it's just that a lot of the people I've met from the west coast startup scene seem very pretentious (and I'm quite sure I'm not the only person out east who feels that way.)

Paul doesn't seem that way at all in this video, however, in fact he seems incredibly down to earth. I found this surprising and refreshing, and it makes me think that I have a misconception about the scene out there, and that I would like to experience it now to decide for myself.
I'm going to take issue with both of those comparisons. Standard Oil was only a dictating force in the economy for a short while, after it took over every other oil distribution company. Oil is a dictating force, the company was simply an outgrowth of scarcity rent.

Ma-Bell was in fact, not the only way to communicate. That's like saying Phones were the only way people got in touch. Its simply and patently wrong. as far as industries that did Ma-Bell's job, you've the post, television, and radio.
Are you sure it's salted? $1$ just seems to indicate that phpcrypt used a MD5 digest. If I were you I would do an MD5 digest of your password and compare it to see if it was actually salted. Considering it's MD5 and your account may potentially have monetary value, I wouldn't be hesitating to be changing all accounts using that password.
.. and the USA defaults February 5, 2012 at 9:31am, Wall Street time.

Down vote me: I deserve it :-)
The title is actually "Two 11-year-old entrepreneurs learned the hard way what it’s like to be a minority in tech during Startup Weekend"

I think it's pretty clear "minority" here means black. By indicating the audience made their decision based on race, the author is implicitly calling them racists.
For web security, I'd recommend checking out this question on Stack Overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-devel...

Also the OWASP top ten vulnerabilities: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Proje...
I think it is too bold a statement to suggest that the idea of an afterlife is rubbish. Who are we to definitively say that there is nothing after this life?

While man's body likely evolved from an ancestor common to all other life on earth, I believe it would be wise to take a humble and open-minded approach when contemplating the origin of man's uniqueness.

As smart as this group may be, when it dismisses everything that can't be empirically proven it misses out on so much of human experience. Being open to those experiences and even beliefs that are beyond the reach of the scientific method will lead to a deeper and more meaningful life.

Also, true religion and true science will never contradict each other. At the heart of both true religion and true science is the same driving force: a search for truth. Though the means of searching are very different, the ends are the same as long as truth was the result.

Anyway, just my 2 cents after spending many years searching for truth in both spiritual and scientific places.
It looks like the original article was taken down, but this is the reddit thread on it: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cmizs/sweet_little...

By the way, Google still impresses me sometimes. I found this by searching for "women chastises free lemonade kids" and the first hit was this thread, and the second was the reddit thread.
http://www.xamuel.com/inverse-graphing-calculator.php?phrase...

Found this link to just such a tool on a related comment thread. Pretty cool.
Thanks, I will definitely implement the multiplier as you suggested. I like this better than showing as a % of total.

I'm storing the total hits so I will do the calculations on the client-side, which means I just might be able to add some toggles for the normalization schemes ;)
Code is a solution, based on a model of the problem.

Understanding a problem is more important than writing a solution that is clean in itself. However, we often don't understand a problem immediately. Writing code (and seeing the results) is one way to quickly gather data about the problem, and so help understand it.

This is where clean code can help: code that clearly communicates your current model of the problem is very helpful part of the process. After a break, it reminds you of the model; someone else inspecting the code can see the model; it is easier to see where the model is incorrect; it is easier to modify the code to correct the model; when the problem itself changes, it is easier to modify the code.

However, there is a trade-off between effort and clarity: it is a mistake to spend too much time clarifying something that might not be correct (or, if the problem will change soon, making it incorrect). Just write code that reflects your understanding of the problem. Regarding efficiency: if you know how to easily make it more efficient without compromising that (e.g. without making it convoluted), then of course do it.

Code is not a final product, but a process. The faster you can iterate, the better it is. (An exception is if you already understand the problem perfectly.)
Let us never forget the first great hacker news bubble.

http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=nickb
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that.
It is possible to override admin templates while maintaining inheritance from the baked-in templates. You can check here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/contrib/admin/#ove.... Anyway it is better to look at the admin not as part of the framework, but a bonus app you get to get started with modifying data.
Original article (archived) http://web.archive.org/web/20101030011901/http://www.suntime...

Coverage from HuffPo http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/terry-savage-sun-ti...
when there's a problem and you don't know how to fix it, you pass a law
At my university, there was 3 day lending policy. With renewals within the day of return. Due to a limited selection, it was possible for others to put a 'hold' on it. This means library staff would keep it behind counter for up to a week before releasing it to the next hold request or put it back on shelf.

Since some undergrad books were in heavy demand (especially due to assignments/exams) when it's common to see holds. Some students have learnt to put the book somewhere else in the library so they could have exclusive privilege of reading it.

Conversely, I haven't heard of the professors or anyone hoarding lent books. All holds I have placed eventually turned up available in <3 days. Your two weeks policy is very generous and something I would have liked over 3 days which seems quick.
I disagree but not because it caused offense. I just see no reason why Google should be adding reminders when only the end user should be doing that.
The Neoclassical Lemonade Stand and Other Confusions
Bitcoins can only be useful for you if other people also use it. Whether or not people use it depends on wether they have trust.

Now, all those who trust Bitcoin less because of this may be ignorant fools and doomed to be ignorant fools forever but maybe you might be able to convince them. That’s all I’m saying. PR problems are rarely entirely rational.
Really? There's still Mailservers around for arpa?
Wow. I wonder how many e-mail validators that e-mail passes...
I feel Wave's problem wasn't the advanced tech, even my mom figured out how to use it pretty easily. The problem I had was that they made it invite only - for a service that needs other people using it for it to work effectively. There were months after I was invited that I still had no one to use it with. Then last summer at my internship we seriously used it all the time to communicate and share between everyone in the office... and then we found out it was being shut down.
Just to be clear, I'm not taking a position, only asking a question: how does the exchange layer affect the fundamental goals of bitcoin, esp. the notion that no centralized authority controls monetary policy?
The point of an exchange is that you can trade one thing for another. E.g., US dollars for bitcoins.

Mt. Gox seems to act like both an exchange and a brokerage. Presumably people have an "account" in which they can deposit and withdraw various currencies.

"It makes you wonder if The New York Stock Exchange actually had the hard currency to back up everyone's account balance." That doesn't make any sense either.

I guess you don't have an account with any brokers participating in the NYSE or other exchanges. You can't open an account without writing them a check. Once you've given them money, you can trade NYSE stocks which may gain or lose value. But the dollars you deposit into your account you should be able to get them out again with low risk.

Each currency or security should represent a zero-sum balance sheet for the exchange as a whole. Unless Mt. Gox spent the hard cash for themselves and hoped the market for bitcoins stayed healthy.

Who do they think they are, a Wall Street investment bank?

I agree it doesn't make any sense (but for a different reason).
Because it is easier to make clean code efficient than to clean efficient code.
(I m talking about implementation (in-)efficiencies, not architectural ones)
How to plot text via equations
This is a straw man - nobody would argue that for numerical code, efficiency is not important. Somehow, I expect that you did no code the diagonalization code by yourself.

Numerical code is actually one of the worst example you can find, because first the API is very clear, and there is little chance to have a change of spec later, making it efficient is generally purely a matter of algorithms + implementation. It is obvious the OP is talking in a context of web apps and co, where this is not true at all.
App Engine uses GQL which is effectively the same as SQL: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/gqlre...

You can still directly append unescaped user input to your query and execute that against your datastore, though the limited capabilities of GQL does limit the attack surface somewhat.
To me, because everyone is so jumpy about it..it means I'm probably correct....just sayin

One of the greatest mistakes one can make, in my opinion, is believing that opposition equals justification. It's the "I know I'm right because they all think I'm wrong" argument that is a favorite of nutjobs everywhere. Don't get me wrong, there are times when a small minority is more right than a large majority, but this is not one of those times.
Haha. I came from PHP and won't ever go back, but, you would be surprised what people use PHP for.
The "same goes to" appears to refer to "what a great way of looking at it", not "stop being so sensitive".
Google reminds about Father's Day, yet it failed to remind me about a birthday over both SMS and email.
1. They launched in NZ, but the service was for everyone worldwide.

2. Akamai might have played a part, but wasn't the main target of the load test.

3. See 1.. the MySpace data center is in the states.
Well, I guess you were taught to bullshit well too. If the kids at the time don't know why they are learning something, they find out when they grow up.

If you are teaching them English writing, then perhaps that is a fault with you, your school, or something else.

Regardless, you still do teach them about what you said so your rant really makes little sense to me.
Ask HN: What is an email address worth?
During the summer of 2009, there was a lot of buzz about the estimated value of a confirmed email address. IBM even went so far as to say an email contact is worth $948 (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_much_is_that_email_contact_worth_948_say_resea.php). Since then, the topic has gone relatively quiet.

Given all the hacks lately seem to involve grabbing databases with large numbers of likely legit-and-used email addresses, is there potential for these hackers to be making a lot of money in the spam game? Or have those techniques and ideas gone the way of the dinosaur? And is there value to an updated approximation to the worth of a user's email address, so companies can give proper respect to the data they've been entrusted to protect?
"...it is a mistake to spend too much time clarifying something that might not be correct.."

I think the problem is that too many people disagree on what is 'too much time'. Not trying to nit-pick but obviously it is a mistake to spend 'too much time' doing anything. That's implied in the too much. That may come off as being pedantic, but I don't mean it to be so. I think defining 'too much time' is right at the heart of the problem. And it's a hard problem to be sure.

I'd also disagree that the possibility of something being incorrect is a reason to spend less time clarifying it...I'd say just the opposite.

By clarifying code you're making it easier to comprehend and thus change in the future. I'd say you should write code with change in mind.

Regarding 'incorrectness' itself...that's the only reason code is ever changed. Whether the code is fundamentally incorrect (the type I believe you were referring to) or temporally incorrect, the incorrectness of the code is always the reason for the change.
As I say: Don't trust a programmer in a suit...or that writes backends with PHP.
I think the initial quote better addresses your point 2

> Money won’t buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries
of a large research staff to study the problem. - Bill Vaughan

Also, Zaphod: If he was asked at this moment where he would like to be he would probably have said he would like to be lying on the beach with at least fifty beautiful women and a small team of experts working out new ways they could be nice to him, which was his usual reply. http://www.otostopcu.org/yazi/h2g2/b2c7.php
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Thank you to a good Samaritan
I guess you know most of the history now though. I wonder how that happened?

See, memories are bad too :P
I find that most people who make their wealth through their own work don't have this kind of attitude.

Of course, I don't know any people worth a few billion, only paltry millions.
Hacker news daily - http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
I'm thinking about it... In any case, it would be a cool project. This would be a great opportunity to try out Erlang for web app development...
My account is also in the list and appears salted. Someone just tried to access my gmail account via an ec3 instance so I bet the salting is done wrong or something else.
The rules in Bitcoin are enforced by cryptography and the CPU-majority. So long as public key encryption works, and the majority of Bitcoin mining power is put to honest use, the system is trustworthy.
Reason: Most .NET/PHP-programmers just don't care about readable code nor security per definition; it's strongly bound to the reason they picked this language from the start.

...or to quote the creator of PHP: http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-le...
Installing and Running Ubuntu Linux
This should be titled "how I learned to stop worrying about memory fragmentation and love jemalloc."

On a slightly more serious note, jemalloc is a pretty incredible piece of systems software. If you're experiencing issues with memory fragmentation or lock contention in malloc(3) it's definitely worth looking at.
I used to do this at Napster, albeit with far less computing resources. I would record traffic to a machine and then play it back at 10-20x realtime to see where my performance limits were using a few machines. Of course, it turned out that most of the limits we ran into were hardware related (the max packets per second Cisco switches advertised was... optimistic).

Of course, I also just tested in production with real users. I'd redirect more or less users to a particular server to stress it and see where it broke. Since we controlled the protocol and the client, I could hide any problems pretty easily. Users didn't seem to care if a for a couple minutes the service was a little wonky. As Twitter has demonstrated, if people love your service, they will forgive some minor disruptions from time to time.

At our peak, we were at 2.3 million simultaneous users, but we had nowhere near the bandwidth requirements of MySpace. It wasn't until recently with the rise of continuous deployment did I think that testing in production was an ok thing to do. I did it because I had to.
Maybe, but only if your awareness and concern for security is non-trivial.
There aren't any easy answers in software development because it's an art, not a science. In some circumstances clean code is better, in some circumstances efficient code is better and if deadlines and money are involved sometimes a complete hack job that's both ugly and inefficient is best. Whenever writing software you have to look at all your available resources, hardware, developers, money, time and figure out the best way to utilize those resources. If a hack job will pay for a rewrite and you don't have time to do it right then do that.
Finding, Downloading, and Managing Media
I know some wealthy people and the first three points seem pretty spot on. I wonder what the last four points were. I think I'll flag articles behind pay-walls from now on.
That's great. Now, how can I opt-out my web server from this?
I agree with that. One thing I didn't mention in my original comment is that I think that there is often a rough correlation between elegant, readable code and at least basic efficiency. I tend to think that code that uses the right data structures looks cleaner. For instance, code using an array instead of a hash tends to look a little bit funny if it's constantly looking up elements by a particular attribute. This is especially the case today when so many excellent data structures and algorithms are already implemented in library code with nice pretty APIs. (I feel that I should mention, though, that the authors of those libraries probably worried a lot about efficiency!)
I am working on code to do logistic regression and predict voters for a local campaign. Take in the past voting patterns from public records, and tell you who will vote this time so they can get pamphlets and volunteer visits.
money can't buy accomplishments
Where did you get that "Little people don't understand me"?

On two pages I read I seen nothing like that.