skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree that there is a PR problem here. I just don't know how or who is supposed to solve it. BitCoin.org doens't have a vested interest in the success of the currency and all they can say is "BTC is safe. Make sure you trust your exchange."

Sure they can flower it up and repeat the salient parts so that's what users walk away with in their mind... but I guess my thing is... I don't want people using the currency if they don't understand the implications. There aren't PR disasters if the users understand what they're getting into.

(and on that note, everything I've seen so far seems to be pretty accurate about blaming the exchange and not the currency)

I guess you could liken it to a bank. If a bank is robbed, we don't doubt the solvency of the US Dollar....
People talk a lot of trash about frameworks like Rails, but I can spin up a shell application with bcrypt authentication via devise, roles-based authorization via cancan or declarative authorization, built-in CSRF protection, and better-than-decent default XSS protection in less than 30 minutes.

Granted, it's not perfect security-wise, but it beats the crap out of whatever mish-mash leads to this meltdown...or the one Citi had...or the one Sony had...or other one...etc.

I think security is one of the few areas where convention over configuration pays off by sidestepping lazy/sloppy approaches.
I just clicked the Print link and went straight to the full article:

http://goo.gl/E5FyA
Internals of the Turbo Pascal 3.0 Compiler
Eight Companies With the Potential to Disrupt the Media
> The OP on the ticket seems to have daddy issues

I don't think you should diagnose people like that over the internet. Anyway, it is not a crime to have daddy issues and it certainly shouldn't be used as an argument not to post tickets.

> If I was her father I'd be glad she didn't call

This made me angry reading it. This is a really hurtful statement and telling of your personality. I won't use this statement to diagnose you, but please reread what you said there, and ask yourself if it was necessary.

> stop using a service provided to you for FREE

Gmail isn't "free", it gathers information for targeted advertisements. Facebook isn't "free" and even it was completely free that doesn't dictate we can't complain about insensitive actions or privacy violations.

> deal with the fact that most fathers, sons, and daughters like each other

Because OP on the ticket didn't like her father? It is a weird fact to force me to deal with, just for using a "free" service.

> the really great part...

That isn't a part of the story at all, more like a weird gloating I don't understand how it fits in.

To me this _is_ a mistake. It is a feature that made Gmail less usable today for some. Who did this feature benefit? Those that didn't care about their father enough to forget to call and need the call-to-action? I bet your wonderful kids wouldn't need a reminder so what did you get out of this feature to give kudos?
I agree it is nice they are being proactive, however it would have been nice if they gave a little more detail to clarify this was merely proactive, not specific odd activity.
13 characters is good. Letters, numbers, and punctuation is good. But note that "abigp4ssword!" qualifies under your rule. Any dictionary terms even with l33tspeak encoding will weaken it.

The salt is the part after the $1$ before the next $. If that's more than a few chars you should be safe until you can change it to something completely different immediately, and don't use it anywhere else.
Google Wave was brilliant, the problem was they didn't themselves seem to know what problem it solved. The focus on the "tech side" was also a problem. Focusing so much on being able to send one character at a time live over the web was cool, and totally pointless.

There are a lot of times where I think, gosh Google Wave would have been great for this situation or that situation. Too bad they killed it before it found an audience.
You've deftly avoided commenting on our mascot. This is just one year into hipmunk - there's more to come. But even a year in, think of all the hours we've liberated for flight/hotel searchers to do other more productive things (like read Hacker News -- OK, bad example).
"A Bitcoin Supporter" says go to Tradehill after the Mt. Gox hack?
I just received this email from Bitcoin@unkown.com:

Dear Sir or Madam,

A few hours ago the Bitcoin trading website Mt Gox has been hacked. Malicious individuals have been able to obtain a database containing usernames, email address and encrypted passwords. This information has been posted publicly on the internet.

As a Bitcoin supporter I'm now sending a message to every email address contained in the hacked database. This is to warn you that your username, email address and password have been leaked. I therefore strongly advice you to change your passwords. If you have used the same password on different websites it's highly recommended to change your password on all of your accounts!

For a more secure alternative to Mt Gox, the community appears to be moving to TradeHill. So this is no reason to lose faith in Bitcoin itself. It must be seen as a warning that not every website can be trusted with your data however! Their link is http://www.tradehill.com/?r=TH-R15683 (Note: You can remove the Referral Code when registering if you want!) This is certainly not the only website where you can exchange Bitcoins, also check out http://www.thebitcoinlist.com/dp_bitcoin/bitcoin-exchange/

Sincerely,

A Bitcoin supporter

---

Headers show it originated at bonecrusher.gulfsouthmedia.com

Smells phishy, as in someone trying to get some referrals from the hacked DB. Any thoughts?
I don't believe that my argument fell into the "false dichotomy" trap. The point I tried to make was that I don't think that there's ever a good point in the software development process where it makes sense to ignore performance altogether. I think that a holistic approach makes much more sense.

My argument was not a straw man. The original author specifically said that he, during a specific part of his development process, "[...] was not thinking about performance, about the efficiency of what I [he] wrote, at all [...]". I understand that he circled back on the performance issue later, but in my view, it makes more sense to start with an integrated performance/readability approach than to achieve both in multiple passes.
Thanks, I know how to get around them but I just don't think I will bother anymore. There is so much information out there that is just as interesting and freely available.
Looks like there's also a Redis 2.2-jemalloc branch. Good to know.
Does the $1000/day limit apply to withdrawing to the Bitcoin network in addition to the bank options? If not the thief could have just send the 500K BTC to one of his Bitcoin addresses, and laundered the money and traded if for real currency at his leisure. Mt Gox can only roll back trades within their system, not transactions involving the Bitcoin network once they're in the block chain.
Not only is it making claims without proof, the claims make no sense. Why would anyone with a large pile of Bitcoins want to drive the price down by advertising how insecure the currency can be?
I like the animation, but it will be an improvement if the chart max stays and not jump up and down
Optimizing clean code is easier, but you're gambling that your overloaded service will only lose credibility slowly enough to give you time to finish (e.g., Twitter found themselves on very thin ice for a while). Refactoring efficient code takes more work but doesn't come with that kind of deadline, it just slows down maintenance in the meantime.
And if "your math" is "number of BitCoins extant time current market value of one BitCoin", your math is not correct. Macha is correct; crashing the market with $500K is proof that the entire MtGox exchange can't be much larger than that, no matter what multiplication says.
Couldn't agree more. Patents are so incredibly flawed -- they need to be scrapped in the digital age.
Out of curiosity: http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=ycombinator%2C+techstars
"4. Watch your lifestyle leverage, especially early in your career."

This is so true. Living way below your mean is so important as that's a great way to gain financial independence to have the freedom to pursue what you love to do.
Damn patents again. How can a p2p network infringe on a server-client patent? In addition, uTorrent is free, how could it cause any financial losses?
An Introduction to Delta Encoding
Also, read the first poem on this page:

http://jerrylettvin.blogspot.com/search/label/Jerry%27s%20Wr...
Care to expand on the differences? I'm not sure if you have an insightful point here or if you're just making a glib anti-American remark.
First, you seem to confuse "rate of return", "inflation rates", and "interest rate." They are not the same thing, yet you conflate them.

But let's roll with it. You still make a number of flawed assumptions:

1. That all investors believe inflation is the problem. George Soros, for instance, is more concerned about deflation and up until recently, had significant holdings in gold as protection against deflation. Ironically, others, like John Paulson, are still holding gold as a protection against inflation. Only time will tell who made the right bet for the right reasons.

2. That an individual seeking capital preservation has to take on "ever-riskier investments." High net worth individuals do not have the same investment options as you do. There are numerous ways you can preserve cash (without sitting in cash) without having to bet the farm, even in today's economy.

3. That diversification plays little to no role in investment decisions. Again, if your portfolio has large exposure to equities, commodities and other asset classes that have gained substantially over the past two years, you are far more likely to feel comfortable cashing out some of your gains and/or throwing idle cash into other asset classes.

4. That VC provides a solid return. If you look at the 10 year returns, VC hardly looks like the asset class an aggressive investor would park his money. See http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/16/venture-capital-re....

5. The above brings us to your last flawed assumption: that every investment decision is rational. If every investor made truly rational decisions, the desire to protect against inflation would not lead one to invest in VC. You'd be overweight commodities, FX, etc. Again, there are a whole host of reasons investors throw money (generally a small portion of their total portfolio BTW) at VC. Diversification is one of them, but don't doubt the lure of bragging rights either. If you golf with high net worth individuals, you'll quickly learn that they like to brag about their investments, even if they're not necessarily good ones. After all, nothing says cool like "I have $2 mil in a fund that owns a bunch of Facebook stock."

At the end of the day, my original point stands: when the central banks pump money into economies, it has a cascading effect that influences the behavior of investors directly and indirectly.
Unable to find a better introduction to the "binary diff" problem, also known as "delta encoding", I decided to write my own. I'd love to have some feedback on whether the content is accessible to people with a general technical or programming background, and of course whether I screwed anything up. :)
Marrying Boto to Tornado: Greenlets bring them together
would be nice if it were all in the same gist (separate files if need be)
The population will contract at some point, one way or another. Either we will reach an unsustainable level of overpopulation or the world will reach a level of economic development sufficient to reduce the birth rate, just like we see in the wealthier countries.
I've just dabbled in Lua but I didn't find the 5.1 package/module system to be particularly awesome. Certainly not worth setting in stone.

The Lua codebase seems so incredibly stable that anyone married to it can probably live on that older branch.

I don't think that this is a good decision, especially as several of them have no maintainer, no documentation, and forks on different websites.

Aren't you almost obligated to drop support for something like that?
It's the difference between seeing something that annoys you and moving on and having something that someone else stuck into your reminder list that you can't delete. No one is complaining about Google's fathers day doodle, people are complaining that Google put in reminders they don't want into a space they view as theirs and there's no way to get rid of them.

I'm glad you presumably had a good relationship with your father when he was alive. It might be worth remembering that this type of thing can be really rather painful and/or awkward for people who had fathers that weren't very nice people, were never around and they can't contact or came from a family with two mothers.

No one's saying people shouldn't talk about Father's day, but hijacking your user's reminder lists and sticking in stuff they can't get rid of because you think it's cool is just not a very nice thing to do.
MD5? Are you kidding me?

There should be capital punishment in software development for things like that.
Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts
vim/emacs
http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=vim%2C+emacs
Anything can be hacked if it has information on it. There's even those terrifying "cold hacks" where you yank the memory stick from a machine that's powered off, chill it to preserve lifespan, and plug it into another machine to read it, the thing coughing up the contents like some zombie.

Nothing can ever be fully secure, but you can make it secure for all practical considerations.
I'm not from the US, and so I only follow this from a distance, but:

Taxes for the top 2 percent are very likely to go higher

Is this actually true? Obama couldn't get support to rollback tax cuts on the rich - is he really going to be able to increase them now? I believe Republican policy is to cut taxes on the rich (?)

In the United States, the very rich hold most of that wealth in dollars, which are worth increasingly less.

This isn't true either is it? Firstly, don't most of the rich hold their wealth in investments (eg, shares), which might be denominated in US Dollars but are relatively immune to long term changes in value of the dollar? Secondly, (despite all the talk) actually hasn't been any significant inflation in the US. (I'll happily concede that the US dollar has deprecated against other currencies, but that shouldn't effect the domestic purchasing power of the rich that much - even allowing for outsized impact due to imported luxury goods)
ClearCoin CSRFs (bitcoin fun day continues)
You don't, just like you don't get to opt out of being the target of a 302 redirect or hidden iframe. But just like both of those, you can detect it and use that information as you see fit.
My response was to a comment that was deleted...If you go and read the thread he posted to...which is about the supposed theft last week there seem to be a bunch of inconsistencies with the story...the biggest being he supposedly had 3btc stolen but he leaves his wallet unencrypted, unprotected, on a computer that after having supposed 3btc stolen and flagging a virus threat...either he is lying or he is very stupid...either way I do not feel bad.

As for what happened this morning I believe that the market snapped right back was a good sign...someone dumping .5M BTC at once at the lowest possible amount and it still came back in minutes.
A single machine loaded down with four high-end cards can do 4.5GHashes/s so an army of bots could easily eclipse that.
Many commenters seem not to notice that this upsets not only those whose fathers have recently passed, but even more those whose fathers have left them or abused them.
You can't. Which is great for users.

Think of it like an iframe. Any page can already trigger pageloads of your page that the user might not had intended.
"I am not that worried about writing a web application properly.... I would be more worried about some security hole in some random service that is running on the server by default, that I never even heard about."

While the latter can happen and is broadly easier for a script kiddie, believe me, the former is nontrivial and very rarely done correctly. Your average web app is full of vulnerabilities, and while scanning can't quite be fully automated it's definitely something you can use automation to help with, so don't think you're secure-through-obscurity.
I hope to hell they're not under the radar because they're working on some crazy Sonic the Hedgehog MMORPG.
Mining was never supposed to be the primary means to obtain bitcoins. As long as people are still being paid salaries in other currencies, they'll need to use an exchange to buy bitcoins if you want them to participate. On the other side of the (bit)coin, do you suppose those merchants you're buying from can pay all of their suppliers in bitcoins? So they need the service of an exchange, too.
I suggest you to look into AdWhirl (https://www.adwhirl.com/), that let you use multiple ad networks at the same time.
Yeah. "I need a clone of Amazon.com and my budget is an auspicious $500. Now, I'm going out of my way to give you this opportunity instead of sending it to India because you're a nice guy..."
http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=bitcoin

Looks like a bubble...
I guess "clean code" is in the eye of the beholder. A lot of my work involves supporting scripts written in an extremely terse language (q http://code.kx.com). Coming from a Java background, the code looks horrendous, incomprehensible even. But the language is designed for the analysis of a huge amount of data using concepts from linear algebra. Any attempt to re-write the code following the tradition "Clean Code" recipe could result in inefficient code.
I think there is a sweet spot for each application or domain, somewhere between the efficient (but unreadable), "clean" (but posssibly inefficient) axis. This sweet spot depends on the tools, the problem set and constraints that the developer is working under.
Hey Jerod. I own the domain HNTrends.com, which I used for a similar project about two years back [1][2]. If you plan on keeping this project up, I'd be happy to transfer the domain name over to you. Shoot me an email: matt@leandesigns.com.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810112

[2] http://www.mattmazur.com/category/hntrends/
Agreed. It seems the real fallout of this incident is the fact that the rollback can never recover BTC taken out of the exchange accounts and put into anonymous local "wallets". I wonder who will cover those losses?
I bought some bitcoins on MtGox a month or so ago. My email address was among those in the leaked database. I received a message from MtGox about the security breach, and shortly thereafter from an anonymous user hoping to profit:

Dear Sir or Madam,

A few hours ago the Bitcoin trading website Mt Gox has been hacked. Malicious individuals have been able to obtain a database containing usernames, email address and encrypted passwords. This information has been posted publicly on the internet.

As a Bitcoin supporter I'm now sending a message to every email address contained in the hacked database. This is to warn you that your username, email address and password have been leaked. I therefore strongly advice you to change your passwords. If you have used the same password on different websites it's highly recommended to change your password on all of your accounts!

For a more secure alternative to Mt Gox, the community appears to be moving to TradeHill. So this is no reason to lose faith in Bitcoin itself. It must be seen as a warning that not every website can be trusted with your data however! Their link is removed (Note: You can remove the Referral Code when registering if you want!) This is certainly not the only website where you can exchange Bitcoins, also check out removed

Sincerely,

A Bitcoin supporter
(bitcoin address removed)
Before they closed it, the BTC traded for $0.01 each, which means they could withdraw 100,000 BTC under the $1000 rule.
Google just doesn't get social media — this is the type of stuff that Facebook was doing wrong over two years ago and quickly fixed. Instead of trying to imitate Facebook they should re-focus on fixing services they already have like Blogger. It's mind blowing to think that Blogger is now in the slow lane behind the likes of Tumblr and WordPress. Google is starting to remind me of Yahoo! in a bad way — a place where good products go to die. My advice for them would be to buy Twitter, but they'd only mess that up over time...
Spam in the modern era is relatively easy to control. However, there are numerous other ways to make a fortune off 300k+ credible emails...
And now it's recursing. Google strikes again.
It's a funny one. It's not smart at all, but it is clever. It's one of those things that seem properly impressive up until you see how it was done.
every one of those accounts already got a notice from mt gox. itself so yes, this individual sent an unsolicited commercial message (spam) by sending this "alert".

though getting the same message multiple times might make it harder to ignore, and realizing that this is a serious issue -- probably not the worst thing to happen, imo.
I don't think usa will default since it is mostly borrowed in us dollars, which it can print in unlimited quantities. Inflation - sure, it's possible; default - highly unlikely.

Greece is in this situation partly because it cannot print euros by itself; in fact this is what the opposition argues for: don't force the population to pay for the country's loan which are euro denominated, which would move greece outside of eurozone and blow its currency to something almost useless, but something which they'll be able to print.
But didn't Gmail start out as invite only? Look at how it turned out.
The bandwidth required for cell phones is much lower, and the multiplexing schemes much more complex. Cell phones use a lot of extremely adaptive variable bit-rate codecs, which is why your call quality varies as you drive.

But fundamentally, they are using VBR codecs that don't even live up to the standard 3.1 KHz PCM bearer spectrum of a fixed-line 64kbps DS0 channel. This is what, maybe 8 kbps (extrapolating from the relatively high quality to bandwidth ratio of something like G.729A, though they're obviously not using that)? That's hugely different than providing multi-megabit access to every endpoint, even with severe oversubscription and statistical packet multiplexing / low contention ratios on the table. This is one of the reasons why 3G network operators are so freaked out about tethering and data usage in general.

Like you said, there's only so much frequency. This "the world's gonna go wireless" stuff is a pipe dream. The enthusiasm for all forms of fixed-line communication will return with great fanfare once application-level bandwidth requirements increase an order of magnitude or two beyond where they are now, because fixed-line transmission is the only thing that can keep up at that point.
Maybe I'm too cynical but it doesn't feel like this was a cutesy addition by a lone engineer, it rather feels like a marketing ploy to get more people to think about using the calling features.
Yeah, if legal and open is more cost effective, they'll likely go that route. Otherwise, they may revert to skullduggery (as they have in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO).
Well thinking of it like an iFrame isn't really accurate because you can bust your site out of one fairly easily.
Amazing that this kind of behavior by Skype/Msft wasn't calculated in the contract at the time of signing it.
> A feature that GNU Screen users have wanted for a long time is vertical splitting

^A-| works just fine here. IIRC, it's been working for quite some time.
Seth Godin on Failing Until You Succeed
Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts After Microsoft Buyout