skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a counter data point to what most people here are saying, I didn't have a problem with the sign up process :)
True, but the waiters and staff are the public face of your restaurant. The owner/manager doesn't get involved in every meal they serve. If you suspect your staff will get cranky with Groupon customers, you need to fix that. I don't care if that means firing the worst offenders and making it clear that you won't tolerate such behavior, or if it means ahead of time declaring that you're going to "fix up" bad tippers behind the scenes by supplementing with the restaurant's cash. It really doesn't matter to me how they resolve the situation, but the owner of the restaurant is responsible for giving his/her customers the best experience possible.
It's absolutely not that. The Mt. Gox system does not allow orders like that.
I think you've confused title with damages.

If I own something, I have legal rights enforceable on it, regardless of whether anyone else thinks it's valuable. If I owned the bitcoins -- I suspect common law would have little difficult in identifying these as distinctly ownable -- then I have enforceable rights in them. I can ask the court to order those rights be respected.

Property rights in virtual property is a fast-growing area of law, however, so: IANAL, TINLA.
I suppose the defender could have a rainbow file of his own and purposefully choose a password which didn't hash-collide with a password of < N characters.
No, you're also wrong. That's called "I'm smart enough to be flexible and willing to take whatever job will get my foot in the door."
They should post some examples
Creating a Web Development Newspaper. Thoughts?
A little over a year ago, I had the idea of working toward creating a publication for web developers, written by the designers / developers themselves. I quite fancied the idea of making it newspaper based, given it was possible through newspaperclub in the UK at the time.

I had a little amount of buzz regarding it, through local communities and some friends but ultimately no one stepped up to create articles for it. That's how it's remained since.

I still have a passion for the idea and was wondering if any HN'ers would like to shed their thoughts - would you purchase a newspaper on this theme? Is HN all you'll ever need? Would you be interested in submitting an article if things were to start moving?

webpap.com
Unless we're speaking very narrowly in terms of hardware, I disagree. I've never used Android on the tablet, but I've owned Android phones for years. I own an iPod Touch and an iPad. The device's interface and the way it influences apps & app developers makes a huge difference.

On Android, menu is functionally equivalent to right-click, which means it either hides complexity or it's a dumping ground, depending on your perspective. I don't care for it.

The lack of a OS-level back button on iOS means most apps put a back button somewhere on screen, or there's page-swiping. Generally you know where pressing that button will take you. The vast majority of the time it will never take you out of your current application.

That is not the case on Android; you can dump yourself back to the home screen from a web browser if you hit Back one too many times. And then there's the "activity stack," an OS-level concept that interacts with the Home and Back buttons.

Maybe the buttons themselves are not differentiators, but they imply or enforce different assumptions which in turn inform the way people use and develop for the device.
Sounds to me like the admins at MtGox are, at the very least, amateurish, and shouldn't be trusted with millions of dollars in escrowed funds.
He also mentions that no stolen user has reported, and that its hard to believe a single user held that much money.
Uh, is that really so? So I can steal whatever I want, as long as I can sell it off fast enough?

Say I am 99 years old and have only one week left to live. What if I go on a car stealing spree and steal Porsche cars for my extended family. Then I sell it to them for a symbolic 1 cent each, claiming that I have collected them over my lifetime and now want my family to benefit.
I'd love to see that extension. If you write it, I will use it. I use Chrome too, so it should work here.

As to what should and shouldn't be part of the browser -- the way to figure that out is experimentation and competition. When you make technologies and standards simple and easy, people will make independent implementations and try things. The vast majority will be dumb, but some (often unanticipated ones) will turn out to be useful, clever, or brilliant. That's how the technology improves.

When you make standards big and cumbersome, progress stops.
This is exactly why I stopped using DDG as my main search engine. My workflow was often like this:

- Search for term on DDG
- Look at results, find nothing
- Try to find better term
- Give up and use original term in Google
- Find result

I tried to use DDG exclusively two time (once 8 months ago, once ~4 months ago), but the result was the same. I don't know how much personalization affects this, but Google just gives me the best results.
I think it's scammy too - just flag the article. They'll learn soon enough that they need to tell customers there's an additional requirement before getting their email address.
Are you using "honest" to mean "good intentions"? Because I think he's told the truth about everything, and I'm not surprised that someone who made money in a market wants to keep that money.
For reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Fd-4NzB0w
Thats not quite right. Being stable is subjective. Ubuntu and a TON of distro's are based on Debian Unstable. Does that mean they are unstable because of that?

Debian unstable and testing are a bit more unstable, of course, but they are still good enough for desktop.
A Guide to Git using spatial analogies
"I'm not really sure how this is true. I find that I can judge a software engineer very accurately based on his previous work, and intuit from the code a great deal of the context."

To each their own, I suppose. Applicant-submitted code samples don't correlate strongly with hiring decisions, in my experience. They're too easy to fake, and don't capture the things you want to know about interpersonal communication, thinking style, etc.

Crass Generalization: I think people who strongly emphasize code samples over everything else are sacrificing a chicken to the hiring gods. It smells very cargo-cult.

"It would be very easy to evaluate the senior engineers by evaluating their components, whereas the junior and/or average engineers can only really be evaluated in context by the senior ones."

Nah, it's always really hard. Some senior engineers don't write a lot of code, but are superb at managing and mentoring teams. Others hole-up in their geek caves, churn out code of varying quality, but are dismal leaders.

My point is: once you've got more than a few people, team dynamics matter at least as much as "rock-star" coding ability (probably more), and you can't tell anything about this from code samples.
My Summer Reading List And Other Ways I've Ruined My Life
Why? There is a perfectly legitimate argument for letting him keep the funds. They were put up for sale, and he bought them. It was MtGox's systems that executed the trade. If the sell order was invalid, it was MtGox's fault, or the seller account holder's, not the buyer's.
Must... resist... anonymously trolling his comments. Not gonna be that guy, not this time.
If it's allowed in your jurisdiction, I'd suggest calling him and recording the call. Write a "script" beforehand of the things you want to say, and have a fallback line such as "I'm not sure of the answer, I'll have to follow up with you on that" if he tries to get you to admit to anything. Meanwhile, try to get him to over-reach in his claims and statements.

You might wind up getting some useful ammunition for later use; or if nothing else, a hilarious recording for further public shaming.
If there is real money in bitcoins, then there should be a real engineering staff running a real, secure trading platform.
There was an earthquake half the energy of the design limit, 100 miles away, 70 years ago.

So, greater than 0, less than 1, consult your seismologist.

(The 100 miles away is the important part, the distance from the fault is critical.)
This is absolutely not how the Mt. Gox database works.

I know because I have access to the source code of the site.

You can't post a trade from 'all' accounts; if a large trade pushed the price down, then a large trade pushed the price down, and that trade was executed from a single account.

Given Mark's statement that the logins which had been dormant for more than a few months were the easily rainbow-table attacked ones, it seems that someone had sent in a lot of bitcoins and then stopped using the system for a while; they apparently had a weak / rainbow-table vulnerable password.

If that's the situation, I'd call this a medium-sophisticated attack; better would have been to drive prices down slowly over a day or so, then use other hacked accounts to buy them up cheaply and withdraw over BTC. That might have taken some time to notice and unravel.

As it is, it looks like someone tried to flash-crash the market, then send out $1,000 worth of BTC at very low market rates, so a lot of BTC. Someone who would do this intrinsically believes in the resilience of bitcoin by the way, which is interesting. I'm not sure how they would plan on dealing with the taint on their coins, though. They'd have needed some sort of high-volume laundering service; none of the ones I know have enough volume to deal with this.
I agree that we shouldn't turn this into a sports flame thread, so let's just compromise and say that it's a team-based sport and that individual talent matters, not one or the other (unlike the OP). After all, the same argument about supporting players could be made for Pele and Maradona as well.
I would be interested in submitting an article but not paying for it. I think it's an interesting idea and would allow developers to show case their talents. On the other hand, it's probably hard to draw people away from HN
Not terribly high, but that doesn't seem like a very good excuse for lackluster design specifications.

Also, it's worth noting that while Vermont isn't exactly the the SF Bay Area when it comes to unfavorable proximity to fault lines, it's not entirely devoid of seismic activity.

Map is USGS, not TreeHugger original, but I couldn't find it on USGS.gov.

http://www.treehugger.com/seismic-hazard-map-us.jpg
This is largely irrelevant. As long as Mt. Gox has the capacity to do option 1, the impacts of option 1 exist or should exist already.
The problems here with Bitcoin come across as the same problems with piracy:

Bitcoin are just bits on a computer.

Just like piracy, when we copy bits from one place to another, is it really "stealing"?

Anyone that says "yes", better double-check their stance on software piracy as well.
AppEngine 1.5.1 Release
Actually, I got that wrong: yc -> cyc and you couldn't really use that!
Want to influence others? Stop being so rational
Bitcoins are just bits on a computer and aren't physically taken away like a car or a quarter...so I don't think you can call it "stealing"
I don't think I wanna do that! :)
The critique of GoF presented is superficial. The main difference being GoF's 'how' against Alexander's 'what' doesn't come from GoF's misunderstanding of Alexander's original work.
It comes from a different role of architecture of a building versus an architecture of a computer program.
It's easier to say about Alexander's pattern that it provides an answer for a 'what' question because the building's architecture is something that people interact with directly with all their senses.
Hence a pattern like "159. LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF EVERY ROOM" ( http://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsample/apl159/apl159.h... ) seems like an end in itself when compared to eg. a iterator pattern, which obviously always will be described merely as a mean to some more general functionality of the application.

The truth is, "LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF EVERY ROOM" is also a mean - a mean to making a room more bright, pleasant and friendly . If it feels more substantial than an iterator pattern, it's just because we directly interact with an architecture of a building in contrast to the architecture of a software, which is always hidden.

There's nothing wrong with GoF, it just follows from the essential quality of a computer software.
I'm sure you believe you are making a difference. /runofthemillsnarkycomment
It's not illegal to manipulate the US Dollar as long as your name is the Federal Reserve.
Worst case scenario at a coal-fired power plant is that it becomes a thermobaric bomb, or the Centralia Mine Fire.
That's... Troublesome.

Now some people have copyright protection on their creative works and others don't? Ugh.

And let's be honest... A 19 paragraph article is a creative work, even if it's not fiction. There's more than just facts there. It took time and effort to assemble it in just that way.

Art is always molding something into something more aesthetically pleasing... Or at least molding one thing into another. Clay into statues, paint and canvas into portaits, words and facts into articles.
How is that not honest? He followed the rules of trade even though he knew he could easily exploit them.
> The driver even hops out of the car to open the door for you!

I loved this the last time I used uber. The driver went as far as to hold out his arm for me to lean on while I was getting into the car, which was a great help because I was having unpredictable dizzy spells all morning long. Then he drove like a maniac so I could get to SFO in time to catch my flight, and he deposited my luggage next to curbside baggage check. Taxi drivers generally don't go that far, they'll just haul your bags out and leave them on the road in my experience :(

Not to mention I had over two dozen taxis, most of them empty, ignore me as I spent a futile 15 minutes to hail a cab on Market Street before I gave up and used uber. Not my problem if they don't want $50, and uber was only $65 in comparison..
Well, the quality of the "typical website" (aimed at desktop browsers) certainly seems to support that conclusion...

There's certainly a very different mindset you adopt when developing for a phone sized screen, and the constraints require super tight focus on the site goals and processes that is often missing from the planning and requirements stage of less-constrained web development.

Google the "mobile first" movement, and pay particular attention for the writing of Luke Wroblewski - while not fully subscribing to "mobile first" myself, I'm seeing some _strong_ benefits from at least considering it at the very early planning stages of any new web project.
We actually built a site to solve that problem. If you have a series of pages (blog, comic, book, etc) and want to mark your place in them with a bookmark that moves as you read, try Serialist (https://serialist.net/).
I don't really quite get what point you are making here. Are you saying that the innovation today owes more to the innovation of the mid-nineties? Are you saying that any innovation now with respect to AJAX and JS does not make your life better in any way?

Seemingly you argument could be made for cars "15 years ago cars were easy to fix and understand. Now they are not, so wake me up when they are like the cars of the mid-nineties."

JS/Ajax help programmers tremendously. Helps speed. Helps functionality.

To view these things through the lense of "I can't write a crawler for them" is a pretty limited view of what today's technology offers.
I can't use my OTP from my Yubikey with KeePass, whereas I can with lastpass - this is a huge plus in my view.
It's interesting that the response to people possibly not noticing the link was to make the link less noticeable.

Instead, you could have tried to make it more prominent by (for instance) moving it to the upper left rather than the upper right of the search results, right above/below the ads.

Another issue that might be interesting to explore is to what extent users really understand what search customization is, and whether they'd care more or less about it being done automatically once they understood it better.

I have a feeling the vast majority of them probably wouldn't care, and take the attitude of "do whatever it takes to make the results you return more relevant, and I don't really care how."
Hammocks Make Sleep Easier, Deeper
I'm actually almost glad Bitcoin has suffered these high-profile attacks. The amount of money actually lost seems to be relatively small, and its better attacks like this happen now, whilst the market is still small. Without regulation or reversible transactions, Bitcoin security has to be very good indeed, and this is the sort of incident that might encourage better security measures.

Quite frankly, Mt. Gox never struck me as particularly secure. I'm very surprised anyone would keep a large amount of money in it, instead of transferring it out to their accounts.
Stocks pick & Stock to buy (June 21, 2011)
I 've seen people spending even more on useless novelty items, so no big deal.
Ask HN: Looking for studies on how non-technical users search the web 
Thought I came across an article a month or two back about this, but can't seem to find it in evernote/google.

Looking for the differences in how non technical people browse/search/use the web.
You've misread me.

You, the thief, are still on the hook for your crime.

The buyer, if they really are a bona fide purchaser for value without notice, is not.

Your family would probably not meet the test, as this would be the first time they've heard of the Porsches.

(IANAL, TINLA)
Sorry for being a buzz killer, but I think an old fashioned newspaper about Web Development is as good as a telegraph transmission about a phone conversation.

I do follow Web Design/Development publications such as A List Apart, and I often find myself copying and pasting code, or going back to them through google. This is something I can't do in a newspaper. Also, most online web-dev stuff is top notch and free, it would be difficult competing against that.
In what way do they have that capacity? That they let him and others clear trades (and made no policy against it) in the window between the trade and rollback, and that their policy pretty much doesn't give them the power to do rollbacks, I don't see how that can fly. As far as I can see, the only real option that Mt. Gox is to let all the trades go through this time and then let the trades go through. It is the only way that Mt. Gox will avoid several million dollars (USD that is) of liability.
I've always found this to be helpful for programmers coming from other languages: http://www.johndcook.com/R_language_for_programmers.html

(not the author, just a fan)
>, but if it saves you a few hours per month then it's a better choice than going for a service like CodePlane.

...and that's the hole in your reasoning. That is not a forgone conclusion at all...in fact it's a non-sequiter.

In the analogy these people aren't getting ANYTHING for paying the 1$ per cup (vs paying 50 cents for the actual soda used)...there is a theoretical benefit of free refills, or it being a reasonable price for the cup of soda...and for the people who use it, it's great.

...but the whole entire premise of this discussion is that for some people that's no benefit at all since they're not using it.

We've already eliminated all the people who are getting their money's worth out of Github, that's the premise of the conversation....we're talking about a service that is designed to cater to people for whom Github's pricing plan doesn't work for their needs.

Additionally, to argue that these people don't exist is a specious argument. I think it's an incredibly dubious proposition that there is ANY service which precisely fits the needs of it's entire target market.

>. But the way to make smart economic decisions is not by measuring hypothetical waste (i.e. how much of the account you are using) but by comparing the options side by side

Yes, precisely.

You make smart decision by weighing your own personal needs against your options. Everyone has different needs, and while Github works for many people, it does not work for everyone.

Again, I'm not prepared to say codeplane represents a solution for all these people...many will simply go to bit-bucket, handle it themselves, etc... but I think it works for at least some of them.
The poster does not seem like a malevolent person at all, but he was clever enough to post the $0.0101 bid order before other buyers in line knew what happened, and the commenters on the Bitcoin forum are clearly jealous. Well played, toasty.
> To each their own, I suppose. Applicant-submitted code samples don't correlate strongly with hiring decisions, in my experience.

We evaluate their open source code or paid challenge project, not applicant-submitted code samples of unknown origin.

> They're too easy to fake, and don't capture the things you want to know about interpersonal communication, thinking style, etc.

All of those skills are important, but they're moot if an engineering applicant can't actually code.

> Nah, it's always really hard. Some senior engineers don't write a lot of code, but are superb at managing and mentoring teams. Others hole-up in their geek caves, churn out code of varying quality, but are dismal leaders.

You're conflating quite a few areas of responsibility here. Some people are good leaders, but leadership is also where poor engineers will run to if they can't actually code -- this is not something you want to occur in your organization unless they actually belong in management, and even then, you risk those individuals pushing for poor engineering decisions from a position of authority.

If a senior engineer isn't actually designing and writing software, they're not an engineer anymore, and should be evaluated by a distinct criteria. If you require non-coding engineers to provide a small engineering team with direction, then you likely either have an overly junior team, or too many directionless/mediocre engineers.

> My point is: once you've got more than a few people, team dynamics matter at least as much as "rock-star" coding ability (probably more), and you can't tell anything about this from code samples.

Nobody (least of all me) ever used the term "rockstar". There is simply an enormous difference between the efficiency and code quality of great engineers as compared to mediocre ones.

Most of what you're saying sounds like the standard bandaid approaches to big-enterprise engineering management with mediocre teams.
What I find interesting is that everyone is saying what needs to be done when no one seem to be sure what really happened. The first thing that needs to happen is an investigation into what really happened (perferably by some outside party). At the same time Mt. Gox needs to undergo a security audit and overhaul as it seems like no matter what happened, they have some major security issues.

I also find it interesting that the person who supposedly initiated the trade has yet to be heard from. Their story would really help clarify things, not to mention that they have not been heard from yet makes it seem as if there is no such single user...
Reading through the forum posts is really quite illuminating. The childishness of the bitcoin miners/traders is understandable given the demographic that this system appeals to at the moment, but the stunning naivete and downright ignorance of the law that is on display from the Mt. Gox admins is the most remarkable thing to me. At this point I am expecting bitcoin to die not due to its inherent failures as a currency but due to the incompetence of the major bitcoin exchange.
Chat sohbet
This is absolutely not how the Mt. Gox database works. I know because I have access to the source code of the site.

All that source code you're looking at means nothing if the attacker gained arbitrary SQL execution on the database.