skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This headline is misleading. The contract Google had with Twitter expired on July 2, 2011. There hasn't been a statement by either company indicating why the contract wasn't extending.

Can we please avoid this sort of sensationalism?
Alright then. Nothing wrong with peculiar opinions but you know that your opinion is very peculiar, right? Software keyboards, for example, can be valuable for people even if nobody can type 150 words per minute on them.
DailyJS code review of the Express Node.js web framework
The Internet is not entirely based on P2P technology.

DNS is maintained by central authorities and a website's domain can be taken down easily.

Of course, you could argue that you could get around this restriction just by using a website's IP (you can still block an IP, but it's harder to do it everywhere on this earth), but then again, how many people will know that IP or even bother searching for it after the fact?

Then you could say that people interested in censored material could very well combat this DNS filtering by using an alternative DNS protocol (using browser plugins, maybe?). But then, that's no central authority anymore and who's to say that you can still trust the content on said websites?

I mean think about it - an evildoer government could very well continue to host the same website, with modified content, with a new (valid) security certificate.

And then, the means for distributing said IP are either (a) commercial companies that have to obey the law of their government, like Google or Twitter or (b) insignificant forums that won't make the news if taken down themselves.

Yes, you cannot block information for the technically inclined, but you can block it for 90% of the population effectively and I think China sets a powerful precedent here. Not only that, but timing is very important. Sometimes censorship is very relevant to the current world affairs, not having the same impact one month later.

I think the Internet is more sensitive to censorship than people care to admit.
Nickel Generators
Yeah it sounds interesting, particularly for developers who like to diversify.

Although the large percent of my career has been developing content management and "corporate" applications in PHP, wether i had to or not, now i mostly been focusing on Python/Django because i like the language, the tooling and feel productive in it, on the things i have to do.

But always loved Java, even when i was learning PHP 11 years ago, i spent a lot of time around Struts (1.x), Hibernate and Ibatis, that's where i got the MVC/ORM/Framework skills from, which was useful for "easily" picking/understanding a lot of other stuff in other languages. Also when Groovy got some traction, i spent personal time fiddling with it, was cool, which also lead to spending some time around Grails. But i never got deep in pure Java skills, even though i have a 700 page "bible" around the house somewhere.

Also tried out Jboss Seam, which found out to be kind of awesome for somethings and at a time was contracted for 4 months, to extend features on an existing project built on it, although grasping the whole JSF/J2EE life-cycle can be a pain and still ended the project missing a lot of know-how about it all. For another particular short-time job, i developed some EJB "if it's not working, there's not enough XML in it" 2.1 code.

Not being a rocket engineer (not even an engineer) and a perfectionist trying to meet deadlines, i ended up loving Python and Django, good ORM, good tooling, community and the backend admin feature is a killer one for me.
Unless you already know how the sizing runs for a particular brand/model, its a crap shoot in terms of if it will fit. This kills the incentive to choose 'something new'. Most often I end up buying replacements for or variants of stuff I have already.
This really isn't that uncommon. When forced to choose between easier customer support or ostensibly better security practices, easier customer support usually wins. Stolen passwords through email/eavesdropping are rare enough that they can deal with it on a case-by-case basis. If someone somehow gets access to the entire database of passwords (also rare) then they have other security issues that likely would have been a problem no matter how they stored passwords.

If company X hashes your password on their server you still don't know that they did it properly or how good the rest of their security is. Basically the only way this differs is that you when you forget your password, your actual password sent in plaintext over the network and is now sitting in your email account. That makes me uncomfortable so I change it right away. Which is the exact same set of steps you would use for a hashed password reset.

Everybody focuses on the hashing thing like it is some kind of impenetrable defense or crystal ball into a company's security practices. It is not.
Twitter couldn't have known when Google+ was going to be released when they negotiated a contract expiry of Jul 2.
Except it seems to be Scala here?
Actually COPPA only applies to subjects who live in the U.S., so his point is a fair one. Even so, according to Wikipedia it requires a large amount of paperwork. Although I agree developers have a responsibility to be aware of this, I think these parents have a greater responsibility not to pass this attitude on to the next generation.
I will qualify my response by admitting that I actually enjoy shopping for clothes, just not online.

Shopping for clothes online is sort of like walking around Manhattan with a blindfold on. You've got no idea what you're getting into and more often than not, you wish you could rewind and make different choices.

Consider the variables that go into clothes shopping.

Size/Fit - This one drives me insane - I've got an extra 15 or 20 pounds around my waistline so size and fit are especially important to me. Some clothes, while 'my size' don't fit well, to the point that I can't wear them and have to return them. Change rooms are my friend! :)

Colour - There is a huge difference between the colours you see online and the colours you see in person. This makes buying a single item from one store to go with an item from another store rather difficult.

Fabric - Call me a wimp, but I don't like rough fabrics, so I'm on of those annoying shoppers who puts his hands on everything. When I buy online, I'm keenly aware that I could be getting a burlap sack...

Then add in two sales forces:

Immediate gratification - When I was in University, I had a part time job in retail (slanging suits). That was my first taste of working in a mall and I was amazed by the dynamics of it. Specifically, how many people would walk by, see something they like, and come in to purchase it. When I saw the behaviour in others, I became keenly aware of it in myself. Honestly, I'd say that at least 75% of my clothing purchases are like that - I walk around in a mall, randomly see something in a window, and make the purchase.

The upsell - A good employee in retail is a dangerous thing because he/she is the person who will take that immediate gratification purchase and turn it into two bags full. I think I have found some of the coolest garments I own through the upsell and I love the process. Unfortunately, I have yet to find an online shopping site that is really good at this!

Between those things, I would much rather shop in person than online. Is it just me, or is there an idea in here somewhere?? ;)
Yes, most of them are my college friends, so they are technical. I've also gotten quite a few people on there that are not technical at all, they just wanted to give something new a try =). Had quite a few people on Diaspora that way as well.
List of pricing pages for web tools and services
The copyright board needs to go.
"Loses access"? It sounds more like they let it expire on purpose. And to me it sounds like a strong message to Twitter and everybody, that G is really serious about G+. "We don't need Twitter, we have our own stream pretty soon."
Rare-Earth Metal Reserves Found in Pacific Ocean
But how was the government to avoid cutting spending? Even if we include the recent austerity measures and ignore the interest payments on the debt Greece is still spending more money than its taking in. Greece can't keep borrowing money from the market if the market doesn't think Greece'll be able to pay its loans back. Greece can't just borrow money from Germany with no string attached because German voters want Greek austerity. Greece cant' default without more austerity to bring its expenses under its income, like Argentina successfully did. And it can't just inflate away its debt because its part of the Euro. Austerity does really suck in bad economic times and its probably worse than inflation, but Greece doesn't have any other options.
Sorry Gojomo, too much crypto-speak. DLP means discrete logarithm problem. It's what makes cracking some key distribution / agreement and crypto-systems hard to do.

http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/EllipticCurveDiscreteLoga...

Edit: Sorry, meant, "hard to break". ;-)
that would be great, especially with multiple levels of visibility: shown in full length like now, just a one-line note for maybe-relevant and outright hidden for the really boring/annoying stuff.
Regarding the size problem, one idea I've had is to create a set of "sizing" clothes, which you send to new customers for free. They return them to you indicating which size fits best. You keep a record of that to match all future purchases based on the dimensions (not just broad size category) of the best fit. You could probably also do this by asking people to send in their old clothes which fit them well. You just use the clothes for getting the measurement and donate them to charity.
This seems like a good time to mention that I highly recommend using the Password Hasher extension if you are on FireFox. It does help to alleviate problems like this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/password-hash...
Blaming Hover.com is shooting the messenger. The problem here is that this is what customers want. As long as you ask Hover to compete for business in a race to the bottom of the "convenience" barrel, you are going to have this problem. If Hover stop doing this, someone else wil come along and take Hover's business by sending plaintext passwords around in email.

So.

You either live with it and do your business with someone who has decided to offer a "premium" service and has a business model catering to educated customers,

Or:

You look for the government to regulate the marketplace as a public good. We do this with things like the safety of cars, we've decided that the marketplace cannot be left to decide this for itself. We attempt to do this with things like the content and handling of food, we've decided that the marketplace cannot be left to decide this for itself.

Perhaps the security of your account is not important enough to impose regulation. Perhaps it is. But as long as it's left up to the marketplace, the existence of companies like Hover is inevitable, and waggling our fingers at them is not going to do anything except make us feel smarter than the average bear.
It would seem Google wants a war on multiple fronts. Those who have tried that strategy in the past have generally lost.
Wasn't Samsung making the original displays for the iPhone, and the iPad?

I agree that in some instances Apple is able to leverage it's large bank account to get exclusives and lock others out of the hardware. If memory serves me correctly, they purchased an enormous amount of flash memory before the release of the iPhone, and though flash memory was available to other manufacturers, there was a significant jump in the price of flash memory.

I think a larger factor has to do with Apple's ability to design hardware and software in parallel.

Other manufacturers wait until the software is nearly complete before getting developer builds which they build hardware around.

I suspect that the time from going from developer release to public availability is 8-15 months at the moment.

If these times could somehow be brought down, we'd see more competitive products to market earlier.

Let's not forget that everybody was showing tablets at CES before Apple announced the iPad (even though we all suspected it was going to happen), and yet competing devices didn't show up for nearly 10 months after the iPad was released.
I guess these guys have taken a fondness to the Anti Security movement...

On a more serious note though its dangerous enough to store passwords in plain-text, announcing it to the world is a bit stupid.
I feel that's probably the issue too. It's been said on a bunch of submissions about Google. I've seen it 4-5 times already.

It was a clever comment but it's an oversimplification.
Thanks, good info.

And even more funny that they messed up including the GA code and tried to use some "async hack" to paste it.
My jaw dropped when I read this. I always looked forward to Len's surprise appearances. He was, without a doubt, one of my favorite people.

I will really miss him.

My thoughts are with you, Meredith.

-- Bill Pollock
The only way we could decrypt the message theoretically is if you brought it to us in conjunction with a "bad actor" on our end. We're not like Hushmail, we don't actually transport your message, we just give you the ability to generate and re-generate the right encryption and decryption keys with one click. Hope that helps.
Yes, many debates about the accordion and javascript usage internally. It is safe however, in case you feel adventerous on that page.
Cheers,
Brian
This kind of assumes that people don't change size. In my experience, this is not true. I'm female and for women this seems especially problematic, especially once they start having kids. This also sounds to me like a fairly expensive solution for the business. But thanks for the feedback. It's good food for thought.
I've heard others describe the difference as a UI issue and I can't disagree more. It takes an engineer to realize, but the dynamic real-time updating of Google+ is /not/ a UI issue. You can't just sprinkle some front-end magic on a system to make it work this way. It takes major backend work to allow that to happen.

Minor point, but the photo quality of Picasa is truly making the experience for me. Facebook's photos are low-quality and built to scale massively, while Picasa has been built as a Flickr competitor. The quality difference and design tradeoffs really show. I'm a photography nerd though, so maybe this does not matter to others as much.

Also, as many have said I think the major hook for Google+ is that notifications are integrated in every Google property.
I think this is what they are expecting, when people outgrow them they will just move on to some other service. Sucks for the users but Google is trying to cater to the masses I feel. Most people aren't maxing out their GAE instance counts and all, they mostly just die off before that.

That basically means you guys are successful or at least more than the others. ;p
Online shopping for clothes is not sufficient for those that believe that fit is paramount, both in sizing and material (tailoring and suits aside aside).

As sixtofour said, you can’t reliably shop for size online unless it’s something that most companies are consistent on, like a t-shirt. Even then I wouldn’t buy a t-shirt online if I haven’t tried it on before: again, fit is paramount and I need to be reasonably sure I feel comfortable in it. Anything below the belt is pretty much out of the question because they are probably the worst culprit of this inconsistency.
I also just noticed that laptop doesn't have a dedicated F12 key, it's Fn-F11. Tempora, mores, etc.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but... storing password hashes (actually key derived from password) is only meant to secure up password re-use. If there is any other reason, please disregard the text below and just correct me ;-)

Isn't password re-use a social problem rather than technical one? Perhaps we ought to use a different -- social -- measure to prevent password reuse. Throwing technical solutions onto social problems doesn't seem to work.

Proposal: let's store all passwords plaintext and force users not to re-use passwords, ever. Let's have every password-using service and system make available hashes (derived keys, to be exact, bcrypt() style) of the passwords completely public; when a person tries to create a new account, the service would check a good bunch other services against password hash matches. If the new password (used upon registration) hashes to the same value as on any checked service, the user is rejected and publicly shamed for endangering the service and his account. More checks cound be performed after the registration in background, to lessen the delay on registration.

That's it. Social problem, social solution.
In the past few weeks, we’ve discussed a new approach that we think will strike a better balance by giving our customers greater control over password management and at the same time ensuring the basic security of those passwords. I’m personally very pleased that our approach will have appeal to customers that are concerned about password security and customers that appreciate the benefits of great usability (and for customers who are concerned about both, blow their socks off

Could anybody find the blog post they are referring to that explains their balance between simplicity and security? I was unable to. However, it does appear that they still send plaintext passwords via email: https://www.hover.com/send_password

If you're looking to switch registrars, I can't say enough good things about http://gandi.net. Their motto is literally "no bullshit" and it's the reason I switched to them a few years ago. They aren't the cheapest option, but their UI is very simple and aesthetically pleasing, they offer free DNS hosting, they don't clutter their checkout pages with any ads or ridiculous upsells, they don't kill elephants for fun ( http://mashable.com/2011/04/01/bob-parsons-elephant-story/ ), and they don't email your password in plaintext. There are very few companies I'm willing to rave about, but Gandi is one of them.
Thanks for your lengthy, detailed reply. I've thought about a lot of these except the upsell.

For fabric, would free fabric samples help win you over?
Their rationale doesn't make sense to me. If they wanted the same recovery process, they could just send you a new, generated password in a recovery email instead of keeping your actual password in plaintext.
> They're classics. I can't wait for ToS to arrive :-)

All 79 episodes of ST:ToS are available at this page on startrek.com (a CBS site):

http://www.startrek.com/videos/star-trek-the-original-series...
Regarding size/fit see my other comment.

Colour and fabric - While this will never be the same as buying in person, I think the situation can be vastly improved by crowdsourcing real photos and videos (not fake photoshopped catalog ones you see on stores).

Upsell - I fail to understand why online stores (Amazon!) don't have live help. I bet it would increase conversions.

Most people don't shop online because of various fears and trust issues, which I think can be addressed if someone really tried.
We haven't defaulted yet, but our current crop of politicians seem fixated on resolving this oversight...

EDIT: Oh, and if you want to get really technical the 1933 decision to not pay back bond-holders in gold but only in US dollars might have been a default (though most people dont' consider it that). And there was one point where we were late with a few payments in the 1970s due to a bureaucratic snafu.
True. That said, designing for scalability isn't that hard, and does not take that much more time than just bunging out whatever comes first to mind.
Steve's older site is Nomadic Research Labs, http://microship.com/. As he says, "Art without engineering is dreaming; engineering without art is calculating."
Well they could just charge for premium accounts, I for one would pay 20 bucks a month for a Google sub with support. Google Apps isn't exactly affordable to the average person and I bet the support options are pretty horrible.
"I'm not sure who's running around saying Erlang provides parallelism."

I'll say it does. beam.smp spins up multiple threads and I see them using more than one core regularly on my machines.
SQL injection anyone? I hope the app is secure
Netflix does that - http://i.imgur.com/OHu8n.jpg
Remove the free apps, the poorly designed apps, and the one-app-per-ebook spammy apps, and you're left with a much smaller number to divide the major portion of that revenue against.
I thought of that issue, but clothes sizes probably don't change that often for most people.

I don't think it's an expensive solution either. Think of it as a customer acquisition cost. Almost anyone would accept free clothes.

Edit: Let's not forget Zappos is killing it. Maybe fit is not that big an issue and can be worked out over a couple of purchases.
Do we really think that compassion does not exist and
that profit is the only reason for doing something for
another person?

That's a straw man.

The purpose of patents is to encourage companies to publish their research. The purpose of patents is also to discourage pharmaceutical companies to produce yet another variation on acetaminophen and instead spend money on doing research with huge sunken costs.

That this doesn't happen in real life is yet another story, but to appeal to human emotion, as you did in your comment, is shortsighted and wrong too.

The reason for that is that -- yes, most humanitarian efforts have egotistical value, profit being the strongest motive for companies to advance the state of the art. Surely, other than companies, state-sponsored institutions, like the army, have been known to produce valuable research, but most such research was in the context of a war.
Currency. Exchanging currency for travel is horribly inefficient and costly.

Legal pharmaceuticals. Hard to sort the legitimate sites from the scams and counterfeits.

Anything involving PayPal. (The reasons have been discussed on HN ad infinitum, no need to repeat in this thread.)

Bitcoin. The dominant exchange is buggy, secretive and untrustworthy. The best alternative is to actually send cash in the mail to strangers.
Yes,

The problem is that in a niche market that threatens to make inroads, MS has an incentive to lower their price to zero or even negative to prevent a competitor from entering the field (and Linux actually never costs zero since no one gives away reasonable quality Linux support and configuration).
We've resumed normal growth, but we haven't had any of the faster than normal catch-up growth that usually happens at the end of a depression and returns unemployment to normal. So by that measure the current high unemployment is to be expected.
>Very quickly, our customer service team was inundated by requests from people that weren’t receiving the email, found the process confusing, and a myriad of other related requests.

Wait a second, so customers wont receive an email with a password reset link, yet they'll receive an email with a plain text password? I guess it's possible, but interesting.
The problem here is that this is what customers want

And I want a pony, they gonna give me that too?

A business transaction is a negotiation between seller and client. You don't always have to give them what they want, and if you are good enough, people won't leave you over that one thing.

If you are going to only use sites that store your password in plaintext because it is so damn convenient, you are not going to have much Internet left.
it's more ironic that he's the top user
I think the main advantage is it doesn't require Haml. I use Haml whenever possible, but I could see this being very useful for Node.js or other JS/CS-based apps.