skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How/If to ask for a company's help
Dear HN,

I have a problem. The project I'm working on involves getting data from businesses whose web-presence is very non-programmer-friendly (Iframes, embedded flash, no API). I don't know how to go about gathering this data, short of asking the company directly.

Is this a good idea? If so, how should I go about it?
no the power lies with the politicians...it's just too small of an issue for the general public to make it a deciding voting issue. Most people travel once a year(if that) so they don't really care about it
compulsory expense, paid for out of our funding

Compulsory and paid from your funding? WTH?
Oh, I did too. Now I feel insensitive :(
As evidenced by his recent interest in killing animals, I suppose.
They could have elaborated on how to achieve this a bit more. At it's core, the thing which must be increased is awareness, of both yourself and the world (which, from the proper perspective, are one and the same). The concrete method is meditation, where the goal is to learn to make your mind perfectly still. In attempting to do so, one will become aware of the things which are not still, these things are attachments. Enlightenment is called the process of self-realization for this reason - when you become aware of how much of what you think you are is really not you at all, you will know your true self and transcend suffering. You will transcend it because you're not the one who's suffering in the first place. Suffering is essentially an identity crisis.
ted.fitzgerald (an invite would be great!)
with 1 million, you can afford to pay a thousand bucks to have someone translate that for you
I wonder if they don't really mean, "2000 of the coins created by the thief and then sold to buyers were withdrawn before we could shut things down"
Which adblock are you using? AdBlock Plus (on Chrome) still shows the yellow bar and the non-link text.
Since everyone in my department at work managed to get invitations to Google+, we've been using the hangout feature between our offices in different cities.

I can honestly say it just revolutionized the way we connect as a distributed group. We just leave a hangout open, and anytime someone feels like dropping in, they do. It's like a virtual lounge that everyone has access to.
This is such a pointless and counter-productive war.
What I don't understand is why employees working in such conditions don't unionise. I've asked around my circle of game development friends, some of whom had worked at Team Bondi, and none were able to give a coherent answer. It's as if they refuse to recognise joining a union as a viable choice. And we Australians are supposed to be a pretty union-friendly bunch.
The German Question
damn! too late, well if anyone's still checking, send me one username at gmail.com
This was my understanding as well; "on the record" meant it could be reported while "off the record" meant it could not. But then I'd have to say that what Jacob says makes more sense.
That idea is absolutely not clever. It's a system that would be difficult to implement, fragile, and most importantly would provide almost no added security.

Programmers: shut the fuck up and use a well known password derivation function. Stop the NIH wanking -- homebrew cryptography is about as useful as seeing the local witch doctor for a heart attack.
Sorry about the word weirdness, waking up.

The article states: Scientists have known since the mid-1930s that water wrinkles do not form if the nerves in a finger are severed

Would such a person not have good wet-grip because:

A) They don't have the ability to form wrinkles

B) They can't grip well because they can't feel their fingers

That's the point I was getting at.
Ask HN: is devving on OSX legit *nix experience?
So I'm going back and forth about the OS for my new dev machine. Will I be getting good experience with *nix using the "just works" OSX.

That being said I'm guessing the inital answer is "No its not"
Your hands also don't get wrinkled in water with the maximum possible amount of salt dissolved in it, no matter how long you stay there. It seems like this must somehow be important.
I can appreciate the benefits of lowering your expectations of others, but I have trouble reconciling how to lower expectations of oneself without sacrificing your goals.

My friends and family often tell me that I'd be more content if I lowered my self-expectations, but I have trouble not equating that with throwing in the towel.

Is it possible to obtain a healthy balance in the middle? I hope so, otherwise I worry that the next Benjamin Franklin, or Steve Jobs, or insert-your-favorite-overachiever-here will read advice like this and take the easy route instead of working harder to follow their dreams.

Seriously though, I'd be thrilled if anybody could suggest that both are somehow possible.
Why not? Give it time and soon enough, everybody will be in Google+. The video conferencing is a huge attraction. If you want a social network non-geeky types will not go, you go to rstatus.com or identi.ca where they don't have features for mass consumption.
More letters to RIM; employees rally alongside anonymous exec
That's part of the risk assessment. They would have to account for the fact that competitors would also bid on the patents.
Presumably Nortel's patent portfolio contains a significant number of patents which could be applied to networking because Nortel had it's roots as a phone company.
I would like to toss the author of this paean to passivity into the ocean.

Yes, sure, clinging on to certain kinds of unrealistic expectations, in certain contexts (particularly personal relationships), can be fatal.

But this is a truism that any idiot could tell you - and in this case the post is generalized to the point of meaninglessness.

Suppose you encounter someone who is openly racist, dishonest or technically incompetent at their job, and no one is challenging him about it. Because it's bad to have expectations about public & professional behaviour, and even worse to actually impose them on others!

Here's the core message: when the world isn't how you think it should be, don't have the courage to try and change it, or to speak out about how you feel. Suppress your feelings, accept everything just the way it is, and - just as long as you yourself behave well - all the bad energy will go away!

Sounds to me like someone trying to justify being a total wimp. Like someone who's so afraid of experiencing any degree of anger or disappointment that they philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness. And I'm afraid that's my overall impression of people who embrace "zen" as a lifestyle paradigm, (rather than just a mindset for, say, a discrete programming project, for which it can work wonderfully). Zen has its place, but taken too far it becomes morally corrosive, and turns personalities to mud.
Who elects the politicans? bruce's point is that if the public cared enough, the public could end it.
Back then, you owned the whole computer network. You could rebuild the kernel, change drivers, whatever.

We would write fake login pages just to burn somebody - wait for their login attempt, print lots of fake security log messages, simulate a crash screen - just for fun.

Imagine putting a potato in your buddies exhaust pipe, or wiring up their car radio volume knob backward.
Since there was no internet, there was no intent to 'rule the world' - just mess with your friends.

So no, it was no more malicious than a pre-med student putting a nervous system in their prof's mailbox.
So, how is this different/better than other functional languages?
$4.5 B. Nortel Bid Shows the Disastrous State of Software Patents
Larry Page's new Google: Will it get derailed by the FTC?
Wow, this looks great! I really dig the no-distraction mode, I did something similar with my terminal program and I love it.

clicks Download

...oh. 10.6 required.

Shucks. At least I got to see pictures of it, I guess.
The Java language is designed for safety, above performance, and ease of creating code. So it is more expensive to create a Java financial system. But safer.
Your friends can tell you how well their LASIK worked, and how much it cost, as soon as their eyes heal. This allows market forces to do what they do pretty well.

Anti-terrorist security measures have neither of these advantages. It's very difficult to find out how much they cost; especially if you include indirect costs to travelers. It's also very difficult to determine how effective they are since, to a first approximation, terrorists attacks don't happen even with lowered security.
I'm not lying, at the time a trojan /bin/login was state of the art. Run of the mill hacking was calling up a strange system and using the login: guest to get access, or trying women's names as passwords over and over until you got lucky.

Actually knowing how to modify a C program was something of a skill, though your peers wouldn't be too impressed. Think more along the lines of office prank to misuse of company resources.
I saw the list of stations, but that isn't new information.

For instance http://www.npr.org/stations/ which maps the locations or http://www.radio-locator.com/ which presents a better list than the linked site here. Don't get me wrong, I think personal projects are great and a great way to learn, but this ShowHN isn't useful or interesting.
Exactly. It would also have made more profit if it had similar sales during the earlier release schedule.

Plus nurturing the talent means they can easily roll into the next project with little or no downtime, which makes that project cheaper to complete.
The Aftermath of Google+. "Ding Ding"
Lambdas in C
Oh. Hmm, that makes sense, I guess it would be considered something one might try for fun...
G+ asks you to decide who is going to see all your posts by default. It begins from an assumption that you want privacy, and lets you affirmatively remove it, rather than the other way around.

You can go to your profile at any time and easily see what you're sharing with others by typing in the name of any person or circle, and see how you appear to them, so there's never any question about what you're sharing.

Sharing on G+ is asynchronous, meaning that you can follow unilaterally like Twitter if you want to.

Google makes its privacy policies much easier to find and read than Facebook, and works from the default position that you want your data to be private, making it up to you to share, rather than the other way around, which is what Facebook does.

Perhaps most important of all is that Facebook has a history of being a bad actor, changing their policies without notice and always defaulting to exposing personal data. Google has had its stumbles in the past, but their history shows them to be a more trustworthy custodian of your data.

They might not always adhere as well as they should to their motto of "don't be evil," but at least they have that starting point to go from.

I believe the quote Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is best known for is "They trust me — dumb fucks."
Learn to love what you're good at.
Completely agree with the types part. I did not try to say that Java or C++ are strictly typed, but that the types (ie. classes) that are used in programs are taken seriously. By this I mean that if you are looked down by serious C++ developers upon if you send your references via void pointers or typecast by guessing.
For those debating whether to have a look:

Reported:	2011-06-29 17:04 PDT by Tavis Ormandy
certifi.ca's very own cert is expired. That doesn't make me trust them much.
Sublime Text claims to be an editor for prose as well as for code. But does it allow you to use good-looking proportional fonts with good line spacing? Yes, in this respect (though in no other) a text editor should be like Word. I write all my "prose" in a simple text editor (Vim), but I dislike the limitation of using only fixed-width typefaces.
The Perils of User-Agent Sniffing, 2011 Edition
bcrypt is so flawed...
This is easier said than done. I'd like to think I learned not to expect anything from anyone, apart from very close persons. And I think it fits in the rational part of how I see things.

But even if I act and prepare myself to cope with people doing unexpected stuff, deep down I'm still hit when they actually do it. And this deep feeling is hard to suppress.

Besides, if you want to actually do something with other people, you're bound to make some assumptions on how they will react. Thus, expectations.
Without TSA we would have lowered the bar on airplane hijackings and opened the door to lower level threats that could easily bring down a pressurized cabin at 35K feet:

Idiots with firearms or other dangerous items on planes.
Simple criminals looking for media attention.
Robberies like D. B. Cooper.

We just need better technology for TSA to make it faster and less invasive. It will happen. In the mean time, relax and enjoy the fact that you can get from SFO to NYC in less than 6 hours instead of 7 days by car.
Ask HN: How to create contact from email/gmail signature?
I've finally found the source of my frustration with the virtual rolodex: creating the contact.

A fantastic feature of the physical rolodex is that one needs to simply place the business card in the rolodex to "create" a contact.

Since email is a dominant form of communication and source of new contacts, does anyone know of a simple way to parse the email signature to create a contact?

(Personally, I don't care if the virtual rolodex is 37Signals Highrise, Apple AddressBook, or Gmail Contacts because I'd be willing to switch if I could create/sync contacts with a "click".)
I'm all for what the Author is getting at here. My one nit to pick is the following:

"Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out."

What does that mean? We need to have a security incident before one private firm is replaced by another? Flying is the kind of business where you need to be spot on every single time or people will surely die. TSA is obviously not the way but neither is simply saying that market forces and capitalism will solve the problem.
Yeah, the site is kind of slow right not but I can't tell if they provide an abstraction layer to various system level API's or not to get access to accelerometers, gyros, cameras, etc. like PhoneGap the other "first open source multi-device development framework" that I'm aware of.
bcrypt at 10ms only being 300 times slower would indicate you can only try 30,000 MD5 hashes per second -- which is incorrect. Using a GPU based cracker on a current generation top-end video card you can calculate over 300 million per second.

Bcrypt at 10ms is 3 million times slower, not 300 times.
Ask HN: Methods to promote an intro video
We just launched our introduction video on our homepage. What tactics do you guys use to promote an intro video for your startup?

"What is 123exchanges?"
http://www.123exchanges.com
The power to end the TSA lies with the public. The responsibility to end the TSA lies with the public. The public need to make enough fuss, so the media reports the fuss, so that more public become aware of the issue.

Really? Just like the power and responsibility to prevent Greece from imposing further utterly useless austerity measures on its citizens lies with the Greek public? The riot police would beg to differ.

If the public anywhere was actually properly informed and asked to make a decision on any of the insanity going on all around the world, then yes, you could make that claim. But as long as we have no say in anything, you're just spewing out seemingly righteous but empty rhetoric.
Google Chrome has 20% global market share
It is an exchange, but hackers are having a field day. People are realizing what the world realized many years ago: we need banks. I feel like bitcoin is going through all of the growing pains and making the same exact mistakes we already learned about currency.
Retro couple having hardcore sex in kitchen.. / free porn tube
Or a stretched newer algorithm like Whirlpool. Or stretched SHA-256? What advantages does bcrypt have over them?
This.

Also, tptacek made a few interesting comments about client-side cryptography:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755713

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1756394

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1001007

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411621
I've been using it for awhile as well and what's totally nuts is that the entire interface (colors, images, tabs, scrollbars, buttons) are all described in a CSS-like language inside a configuration file. I actually changed all the PNGs out to make the tabs look different and go for a Lion-like scrollbar and it was no sweat. Everything in the entire app is described in JSON config files so you can literally muck around with the internals as much as you want. The best is when you miss a comma, restart Sublime Text and the entire interface is garbled :)
So some Bitcoins are 'real'. Huh. And the rest are 'imaginary' I guess. From where I sit, they all look imaginary.

I haven't seen a 'real' stock certificate in 20 years either. But stocks are actually backed by something, somebody.

Bitcoins are backed by ... a sysadmin? An algorithm?

I'm reminded of when bond trading changed - folks stopped buying the bond, and instead just bought a 'coupon' representing the interest on the bond. Whaa? Kind of like betting on the horse, instead of owning the horse I guess.

So, bet on Bitcoins all you like. But when you get burned, its not very ingenious to complain about it.
Very next sentence: "It is important to remember too that just because competitive markets might not provide the best of all conceivable worlds doesn’t mean that government intervention can."
IOS 5 firmware will block downgrades
Developers can use phonegap to provide these abstractions where they make sense (mobile).

Another focus of the framework is TVs and connected objects, where we do provide abstraction for media elements like video : each TV SDK (Samsung, Philips, LG, ...) has its proprietary widget
Google appears to have learned from the Buzz backlash. G+ pushes privacy by default from the first person you put into a circle. You can't 'friend' someone without first thinking about who they are, what they mean to you, and what you want them to see. This alone is a big step up from FB where groups are a hidden, not often used feature.
One of their mistakes was to publicly announce they were placing a major bid to protect themselves against patent litigation. Their opponents sensed weakness and trashed the party. This will be yet another business case for corporate secrecy.
"What do they (bosses) want?"

Sometimes they want software that is a good selling point. A language can be 100 times better but if the customer never heard about it it can be hard to sell. Some customers just want there product written in .Net or Java.
motley.crue.fan
C^x grows a lot faster than x^C, except for specific x's and C's you're almost always much better off adding to the length. And 20's nuttin'. At the risk of publishing more hastily written code for critiquing, here's a shell script password generator I use sometimes. https://gist.github.com/1058565
I agree with you that Google is pretty good about letting you export data. I just exported my Picasa pictures a few days ago. I use POP3 to keep a local copy of GMail. I also periodically take a local snapshot of my Blogger based blog.markwatson.com.

All that said, I also used Facebook's export facility several weeks ago. It worked fine, but then I realized that I didn't care about backing up my Facebook data and deleted it :-)

Earlier this morning I sent a review of Google+ to my customers as a FYI. I made the same point that Scoble did: techies will like the fine grained control, most people will not care.
If you know the previous work factor of a hash, you could of course re-hash it New-Old factor times.
If you happen to still use Firefox, there's an extension It's All Text that allows you to use an external editor like vim for textarea input. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/

There are somewhat similar extensions for Chrome to get the same effect, but requires a more elaborate setup to get around the sandboxing used by Chrome. http://superuser.com/questions/261689/its-all-text-for-chrom...
You don't have to give up jQuery. You can use jQuery in your CoffeeScript.
I read an interview with a record executive a long time ago and he answered the question, "How do you find the next big thing?"

"That's pretty easy," he said, "I just look for something that parents will hate."

That this is a successful strategy is self-evident. (American) kids want to differentiate themselves from their parents and will pay money to do so. They'll probably latch on in some form to anything as long as it fits the criteria that their parents don't like it.

I think it's a safe bet that the social networking site that replaces Facebook will have fewer features, be ugly, be more difficult to use, and have no redeeming qualities other than nobody's parents are going to participate in it, and kids will identify with it as the cool thing for that reason.
Or maybe they had no real interest at all and were instead making a big PR game out of it to get the others to spend more than they would have?
Learn about Health Food Pyramid
> Some customers just want there product written in .Net or Java.

Those people are 'clients' rather than 'customers'. The former are people who mostly likely are paying you to create something specific. The latter are purchasing a program, or access to a program on the web, and unless it's something that integrates with other bits of IT infrastructure, likely don't care a bit what it's written in as long as it works.

One of the things I'm loving about working on LiberWriter is that people don't care in the slightest what it uses as long as it does what they need. Night and day from regular battles, discussions and intrigues in the consulting world over tech choices.
If you use the command line tools like make, gcc, scripts, autoconf, etc., then it's almost exactly like developing on Linux/Unix.

If you use Xcode, then not so much... though it's still more like Linux/Unix than Windows.
Amy Winehouse Site Gets Hacked, Hackers Take On AntiSec
Amy Winehouse‘s official website AmyWinehouse.com was recently hacked.

A group calling themselves SwagSec hacked the singers site and turned her page into a giant flashing screen with a slogan that read, “Swagger Security – Winehouse = No Swag”.
"look at successful games, they're all made that way, so 'bad' management must work better than 'good' management."

That's silly logic, might as well as admit that since sweat shops make money then all companies should be run as sweat shops.

In my experience bad management succeeds despite itself, usually because of the workers who put up with it and push to succeed for their own reasons. In those cases the bad management does everything they can to take the credit for the success but blames everyone for the failures.

This is far more common in multiple industries than it should be. The main reason this happens, in my opinion, is most of the people you would want as managers (because they would be good) don't want to move into that position. They want to stay where they are since they like what they're doing. For example, moving a developer into a management position often means no more development for that person.

Not to say all management is bad, there are companies out there that do seem to get it. Valve seems to be the model we all should have in mind based on some recent stories I've read.
I wonder if the whole restricted invites thing is part of a marketing strategy aimed at Facebook:

- Preview ahead of next week to steal FB's thunder about their "big announcement"

- Invites quickly pulled

- Everybody who doesn't have a G+ invite begging around for one, they're even up for sale on eBay - everyone's just waiting to get onto G+

- On same day as the FB announcement, G+ goes public, everyone invited

- Zuck makes his "big announcement" (I dunno, maybe video chat or something) and everyone shrugs.
How To Have A Baby