skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Dijkstra's heyday --- up to about 1970 --- logical proofs of correctness were a great deal more practicable than tests as a way to assure software quality. There were several reasons for this:

1. You weren't writing the software in a portable high-level language, but in assembly or machine code. Consequently a new machine was running new software, or simulating an old machine (very slowly). Waiting until the new machine was ready to begin writing the software (assemblers, simulators, compilers, OS) would have enormously delayed delivering the machine to customers.

2. Computers, and thus tests, ran a lot slower. Logical proofs of correctness ran at almost the same speed. Consider the System/360 Model 30: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainfra... --- 34500 32-bit-word additions per second, compared to 10 billion or so on the machine sitting on your desk, not counting the GPU or possible SIMD instructions. A test that would take your machine a millisecond to run would take the Model 30 about 5 minutes. This also meant that the cost of a bug that necessitated re-running a big compute job was substantial, even if it was caught and didn't produce any worse results than a resubmission.

(There are, of course, proofs of correctness that we can do today with computer help that were not practical then; but those were mostly not what Dijkstra was considering.)

3. Computers mostly weren't interactive. Timesharing was being born, but it hadn't taken off yet, and there were only a small number of computers dedicated to the usage of a single person, or on which you could reserve single-person time. This means that the speed problem is actually much more severe than it appears --- your 1-millisecond test might take 5 minutes to run, but you have to put it in the job queue, and you'll get the result probably within 24 to 48 hours --- and also that the most valued properties of your program are things like "correctness" and not "usability" or "fun". (Usability was actually already important in avoiding user errors and associated incorrect results and wasted computer time, but most people didn't realize this yet.)

4. Computers and support software were much simpler. (And, to hear the old-timers tell it, much more likely to behave as specified.)

Despite all this, I think that some of Dijkstra's emphasis on structuring software so that its correctness is easy to verify is part of the mainstream today, and it's essential in making the software testable. Take a look at The Elements of Programming Style and compare the programs they quoted from textbooks to almost any modern code.
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Nonstop High-Speed Trains Enabled by Docking Trams [VIDEOS]
Would be nice to see where the email was leaked from…
In theory, yes, but the problem with this kind of complex scraping is that you're constantly chasing the moving goalposts of facebook's code updates, which are frequent.

See also: poker bots.
Instapaper stores only salted SHA-1 hashes of passwords, so those are relatively safe.

--

Obligatory statement on NEVER USING SHA-1 HASHES to make passwords "safe".

Any normal person can brute force millions of SHA-1 hashes (salted however much you want) per second on a GPU.

If the FBI so wanted (although I don't believe they do) I'm sure they could brute force almost every single password in that database. Granted, it's the government and they have better ways of obtaining such information, but if there is someone the FBI is watching on Instapaper's databases and they so wanted, storing the SHA-1 hash of the password all but handed them over to the FBI.

I am now glad my Instapaper password was generated randomly, 16 characters long, and I will now change it just to be safe.

For anyone running a database which stores ussername/passwords, take a look at bcrypt or scrypt. They're millions (no, I am not exaggerating) of time better than SHA-1.

(Edit: Grammar)
"we haven't found a way to get people to fund and use them enough to make them viable outside big cities"

"We" being? I live in a village of <5000 and have access to a frequent train service into London, and another hub in the other direction. From there I can get to pretty much any town in the country in typically no more than three hops, and usually quicker than I could drive.

It's not perfect, and funding /is/ a problem, but please don't assume that your experience is universal, or that yours is the only country represented here.
An in between solution would be better - write an open source version of Instapaper that people could install on their own servers, instead of everyone rolling their own.
Bring instant and free Twitter followers on your account through traffup
Everything is a remix, but I'm not comparing game quality, just popularity. One thing is obvious both companies made very popular games on Apple's platform. Once could easily argue that Apple made more money directly from Popcap, there was no Apple app store (with Apple's 30% cut) to sell games back then.
Insurance companies can see how reliable these things have become, and they know how bad humans are at driving. Insurers will probably start mandating automation (or offering incentives) in the next 5-7 years.
More accurately, trains and buses can be incredibly efficient per passenger mile.

Anecdotes are not data, but our local buses (city of ~50k) rarely have more than one rider, and a plurality of those I see have zero riders. In our case, these autonomous cars would be a much more efficient solution.
FWIW, we also found the HTC HD7 to be unreliable in QA. While I like Windows Phone 7 overall, I will not be buying an HD7 for my personal device.
Ask HN: Is daily masturbation harmful for programmer productivity?
I've been masturbating daily, 1-2 times ever since I can remember this word. I've never discussed whether this is natural or not with anyone yet. I've worked so far as a freelancer and things were fine. But ever-since I moved into an X hours per week mode, I've been trying to plug all the holes in my random bursts of productivity.

At this stage I find my daily masturbation habit (since 2 digit years), coming in way of my work.
Is daily masturbation natural? As a programmer, what's your take on it?
What's wrong with the work the FBI did?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/FBIZodiac...

Look at pages 105-114. Seems pretty believable to me...
Of course, then you have to keep careful tabs on that country's politics. The police can't confiscate your data in June, until a new bill is passed in July, and suddenly it's up for grabs.

Furthermore, I'm not sure I'd want to host my data in a country where the police cannot pursue digital criminals.
At the same time it's possible that they cut deals with the processors to be certified in some way, so that if the numbers are retrieved using their service the card is considered present.
Hi Pony - it's not about signup process. It's after signup process (free trial) - how do you manage your customers?

Normally, people handhold but it doesn't scale. This is automated marketing way.

Thanks.
Ink-Redible Dress Made Out of Vibrating Pen Nibs
GED Online
To earn a GED online, is very easy and interesting as you don't have to go for attending time consuming traditional classes, all courses and materials are online which can be read and studied anytime from the comfort of home.It is never too late for you to get a High School Diploma through GED certificate and it becomes more easier when you only have to do it online just by taking the online diploma test.
I didn't downvote you, but your "If you're the FBI and you want X, you'd simply Y" has nothing to do with reality. In reality, when any law enforcement organization needs digital evidence of any kind, they take everything. There are chain-of-custody rules that require it.
How fast is Truecrypt? How much would this slow down database and file access?
How do you know when it's done?
swanson - I am aware of postmark and sendgrid etc.

However, these help in delivery. So, we build on top of these to automate your email based on user behavior and funnel step.

Does it make sense?
And instead of 50-100 people on 1 vehicle, it's 1. Not really eco-friendly, and not cheap either.
username+randomstring@g[oogle]mail.com should be normalized to username@gmail.com, as well. I used a custom extension for MtGox that wasn't found.

That said, really useful service. On the other hand it's sad that we actually need something like this.
The Eleventh App - A response to DHH 10 apps argument
Personally I avoid it because it's not very reliable(in Houston at least. It was pretty reliable in Germany) and it's not that effective at getting me where I want to go. There's still huge sprawls of land that are actively used but not connected to the public transport routes.
Twins drop legal claim against Facebook founder
With location aware advertising that pays attention to the current conversation topics and that is capable of dropping you off at a businesses physical location which also gets charged on a CPD (cost per drop-off).
German Motorists Unsatisfied with Cars – J.D. Power Study Shows
Facebook Adds Netflix Founder And CEO Reed Hastings To Board
Watch"cars 2"online"free"megavideo
watch"cars 2"online"free"megavideo
John Lasseter does not like suites a fact that he was very open about While about a third Toy Story film Toy Story is my favorite of all time Pixar has announced a sequel to at least my favorite movies I was already talking about how Pixar had lost his touch
However they do it it better be secure, otherwise definitely expect a market for illicit little devices that allow you to plow traffic out of your lane on the interstate.
I have been thinking about switching everything to bcrypt, but there is definitely way too much confusion about bcrypt vs scrypt, how many rounds to set for bcrypt, etc. What is the definitive source for figuring out what the new standard should be? Does anyone have any links to something that's peer-reviewed and approved for use by someone with enough authority to do so?
A better way of putting it would be "Pace yourself".
Can you describe why it's better?
I suspect this would only be reasonably applicable if you manage to reduce disk accesses to the very minimum. I'm not very familiar with these setups, but I assume they slow down disk accesses quite a lot.
Does Apple Own html5.com? Redirects To HTML5 Page On Apple’s Website
Lease the technology to, without loss of generality, Toyota, for annual license payments higher than the GDP of some nations.
Here, let me save you some time:

If you're asking, then YES. You should change your password.

Edit: I get what this is doing, and it's a neat idea... But the answer is still always YES if you ask that question.
العاب للبنات فقط 
العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط العاب للبنات فقط
It's called the constitution of the United States. If the enforcers don't follow it, your only recourse is the Supreme Court which will probably throw out your claim for national security reasons.
"More efficient than a bus system nobody uses" is a pretty low bar. In your city's case, shutting down the bus system and having everyone currently riding the bus take (potentially subsidized) taxis would be way more efficient, both environmentally and financially.
Microsoft working with Joyent and the Node community to bring Node.js to Windows
Haha -- fair enough Damoncali. Good point.
He obviously didn't go out of his way to make sure the entire project was above board as he didn't check the art, therefore the statement is disingenuous.

I think jerf's got the wrong end of the stick of the idiom:

went out of my way

It doesn't mean try, it means done more than necessary, when he hadn't done the necessary. He hadn't even checked whether they'd be any issue with the artwork.

If he'd said I thought I went out of my way it'd give the sentence the meaning that jerf and you seem to be giving it.

But he didn't and so gallerytungsten is right, although being a little pedantic as the author did later explain he'd just assumed the use was transformational enough.

When I was reading the article I had to re-read the first few paragraphs as it doesn't actually make sense (to say he'd checked the entire project was above board when it clearly wasn't or he wouldn't be writing the article).
The Startup House: startup hub in San Francisco
I can't help to compare this raid with the feds raid to the Novus Ordo Seclorum hosting company pictured in Cryptonomicon.
this is not shared hosting. the server taken belonged to instapaper. being located in the same datacenter should not be grounds for seizure.

if you're looking for a metaphor, think about a self-storage facility ([one of these places](http://www.moversandpackers.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/s...). imagine you're renting one of those units, and somebody renting a unit on the other side of the yard is a drug dealer. the FBI comes in, and in the process of seizing the assets of the drug dealer across the yard, they also seize all the stuff in your storage unit. There is no way that is reasonable.
I completely agree with that blog post. We are currently in the process of bootstrapping a web project http://bebbl.com and got some echo from the local media. From all the media coverage we recieved there was only one journalist who was able to write about our project correctly. All other either just copied text from others or were not really able to get the idea right.

I suppose the problem for them, is that they need to produce something really fast and have no time to go deeper into the field.
But people don't use them that much! In theory trains and buses are more effecient, but since they aren't used that much, that means people don't care about that.
I believe Parent is making fun of the overreaction to the Silverlight and Windows 8 news.
Why is this even a feature?

My wife just bought a VW (which shares a lot of compenentry and design talent with Audi) and it is (IMHO) full of over-thought UI "features" like this that just make the car mysterious to use. A lot of the software UI in particular is just execrable. A ton of fun to drive, though.

Wouldn't it make more sense to just...

I think it would make even more sense to not build so much soon-to-be-obsolete electronic gear into a car that may (mechanically speaking) be viable transportation for decades.

But I guess car makers, like the makers of anything, are more interested in features that help the cars sell rather than features that make the cars easy to live with.
Because he didn't license the recording, he licensed the score. That's well-established; there are multiple rights in a piece of recorded music (the score, the lyrics and the mechanical rights to name three).

So you can have multiple rights here. Clearing the rights to the score is easy - if the composer is ASCAP/BMI/PRS/GEMA (etc) then there's a standard license they've agreed to, so you pay your royalties and you're away. Mechanicals and lyrics can be a bit more complex when you start creating transformative works (ie sampling, rewriting words, etc.)
> can brute force millions

Modern consumer video cards can do billions per second now. You might as well just store them in plaintext instead of using SHA1/MD5 with or without salting. :/
I don't know. It would obviously slow down database access. It would be nice if someone tested this.
I don't think this is reasonable. If you lose power, the the volume is toast as I understand it.
Yeah well, actions like this give the image of fat guys in suits who hunt and peck at the keyboard and move icons around on the desktop to find where they are hiding that dang data.
More info on the official node.js blog http://joyeur.com/2011/06/23/joyent-partners-with-ms-to-port...
And from Joyent
http://joyeur.com/2011/06/23/joyent-partners-with-ms-to-port...
If Google own a lot of the patents on it, and it takes off then Google get a cut of every car sold for decades.

What was Henry Ford's options for monetizing horseless carriages in 1900?
The good (and bad) of these sorts of "why didn't I think of that?" deals is that they are just that; mostly 1-shots. Kudos to the guys that did it, and woe be to the inevitable copycats.
Can an introvert launch a startup?
(I've read once that Dolphins may be almost as sentient and sapient as we are. In this case, they should have right they currently don't have.)

Like which ones? The useless (to dolphins) ones such as freedom of speech or owning property, or the ones many humans don't have like kind treatment and living in an uncontested land like they used to?
No, the first order of business is to stay within the bounds of the law. It does not matter how solid your chain of evidence is if that evidence is illegally obtained.
Really...whats cheaper and easier to build. A ship to keep people alive for 50yrs or tiny cargo ship to send the other side of the teleporter?
No there isn't. You only think that because when geeks discuss anything that involves one or more knobs, a huge debate must necessarily ensue about the proper values of those knobs.

Just use the bcrypt defaults. You will be fine. You will in particular be so much better off than salted SHA-1 that this topic will be mooted. Later on, maybe in 5-10 years, you can re-engage with the debate about what a good cost factor for bcrypt will be in 2020.
(Full disclosure, I'm a stock holder in Square)

There are two good reasons Square doesn't do this that I can think of off the top of my head.

First, CNP vs CP card processing rates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_not_present_transaction

Every credit card has the CC number encoded in to the back of the card, but in addition to that, it has a couple bytes of extra information. That extra information qualifies the merchant for a lower processing rate if they SWIPE the card. That means, when you take a picture, you are paying closer to 3.5% instead of 2.75% for every transaction. (rates quoted are square's cp vs cnp rates)

Some merchants are extremely sensitive to this, other aren't. The larger a merchant is, the more likely they are going to care. On the other hand, no merchant wants to lose a sale, 3.5% of a sale is still better than 100% of a lost sale.

The other reason is based on UX. It feels really weird to have someone take a picture of your credit card using their cell phone. The apps that use this technology might be doing anything with that image.

Otoh, more people should take credit cards!

(edit: Sidenote, Square considered doing this before the swiper was invented, during the very first month or so. Doesn't mean it is a bad idea, just that Square moved away from it in favor of a swiper.)
"What PHP really needs is: Strong leadership and an official process to submit new ideas, extensions", "New blood, and less old blood.", "A plan for the future of web development".

PHP is an opensource project: volunteer!
Dyson 'Air Multiplier' a blade-less fan
> I find it rather scary that people write code for a living without understanding concepts such as this

It's scary but the industry is full of such people. In germany here it's really bad as we have 2 ways to become a (official) professional programmer:

1) Studying CS at the University
2) A 3 year apprenticeship where you learn to be a state approved "computer scientist with a specialization".

Way 2 is still pretty popular and though not all people going way 2 are bad there's not much fundamental CS theory you learn there. You work for 3 years in a company where they teach you their way of software development (and you have blocks of school lessons every few weeks). The education is pretty lacking in fundamental theory. The people only learn either .NET or Java (depending on the shop they are working in).

It's not uncommon that people can't tell you the difference between long and double (other than that one can has a decimal point). Don't start about pointers, manual memory management or things like stack frames/stack layouts. And they don't want to know that stuff. "Why should I learn that? The compiler/runtime does it for me!" is often an answer you hear.
Its pretty similar to what the US Secret Service was doing in 1990.
http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
A Clean Shirt Everyday
He already did:

"Any normal person can brute force millions of SHA-1 hashes (salted however much you want) per second on a GPU."

This is not true of bcrypt.
FTC launching antitrust probe over Google search, ad businesses
http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

(Be prepared for your comment score to visit the grey depths if you attempt to relitigate Coda's blog post here and don't know exactly what you're talking about.)
MS has money, which most people accept.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:AMD_K5_P...

btw: there is a story about a company committed to Open stuff (Linux, Qt), just to [d|b]itch it.
Other-Firebird
Breaking CAPTCHAs with probabilistic programming
Interesting. I was talking about this idea 2 weeks ago with some friends. Here in France Square doesn't work since only chip cards are accepted, not magnetic stripe cards. So card.io could have a greater market penetration worldwide than Square.
You know what's awesome? That the journalist makes perfect sense to me. This guy is just apparently not the target audience.

First off, the more data that Salesforce controls, the better they have locked in their customers... Or the more customers they have. I pity anyone who uses Salesforce and decides to leave for greener pastures. It would be a bloody nightmare.

The second clip talks about using social networking to learn more about their customers and increase retention. Not that mystical.

The third throws some buzzwords, sure, but it also warns people that not everything that's called a 'cloud' is actually a 'cloud'. In other words, some services behave like you expect 'cloud' services to (insane uptime and rendundancy) and others don't.
i am wondering why these companies wern't using EC2?
Full-disk encryption. You enter the key whenever the system needs to be rebooted. I know at least one company that does this with all of their US-hosted servers.
Do you have any suggestions on safe countries? As far as I can tell, the USA is still has the best mixture of freedom and protection available.
Obviously you should back it up, like you would be doing anyway.
I'll give David credit where it's due - Rework is an excellent book, ROR has a great fanbase, and 37Signals products are generally very well executed.

However I find myself paying little attention to anything he says because it's all just so negative. I unfollowed him on Twitter because I just found every single one of his tweets to be criticising someone else or someone else's business. There's only so much negativity you can take from one person. </2¢>
This concept uses social media to gain knowledge of internal activities and externally about customers to ultimately help increase customer loyalty and foster interaction between employees and between the company and its customers.

Reminds me of psychotic speech patterns.
Ask HN: Review our Chrome extension - ContexTube
Hi,

As a way to show what can be done with our data (http://seevl.net && http://developers.seevl.net), we've build a Chrome extension for YouTube that displays contextual information (biography, fact-sheet, etc.) and recommendation for music videos on YouTube. Why ? Because we spend lots of time listening to music on YouTube and thought that would be cool to learn about artists/bands while we're listening to them.

The extension is available from the Chrome Store

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/developer/detail/ifkepnnmiibjoocopfhnglmcoidfeaho

We'd love to get your feedback about it - Thanks !

NB: Backstory: http://blog.seevl.net/2011/06/21/contextube-bringing-context-to-music-videos-on-youtube/
Would splitting the data in half work?

I mean literally cutting the data sent into two pieces and each piece entering a different database server in a different country. Then, when requested, pulling both pieces and sending them to users who patch them together with client side script...?
LinkedIn To Leverage User Follows And Recommendations In New Social Ad Formats