skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO, this article is much ado about nothing. There are plenty of companies that offer programmers interesting challenges. I dare say that most of us posting here work in such a company, or have before.

For those programmers who are supposedly stuck in a hellish 9-5 mix of Javadocs and enterprise-grade XML and ETL and SOAP, consider, for a moment:

1. Are they really "stuck"? The market for programmers is massive; why should anyone be stuck in a job that they hate?

Of course there may be risks -- big enterprises have steady pay, benefits, and much more certainty than the startup, but if you pick those advantages over taking a risk... well, you can't exactly claim to be stuck, now can you? :)

2. Are those jobs really "hellish"? Personally, I'd dislike them. But an unhappy programmer is an unproductive programmer, and companies can't survive being staffed by unproductive programmers. Is it that hard to believe that programmers exist that enjoy just chaining technologies together?

In the end, there are far too many options out there for this "woe is our industry" type of post to really mean anything. But I'd propose, as a simple solution for people who hate their day jobs: go home and do something you find interesting. Maybe you can build a company around it. Maybe it gets you noticed by a cool company. But at least you're having fun.
Music of the (binary) trees
"the country has an operating cash balance of $73.7bn"

How is this so? I thought the annual budget was in deficit. Quite significantly, in fact.

And not to mention the country has a massive debt. Although I understand how that may not affect the operating cash balance.

The headline definitely seems like it could be used as a sound bite for corporate tax increase commentary.
I don't know why but on top of feeling bad for this woman, I feel bad for the AirBnB guys because the whole concept is so idealistic and believes in the good in people--if only everyone represented humanity the way they envisioned this from the birth of their idea; that would truly be a good world.
AirBnB are on record saying one of their principles is that people are generally good. They have to believe this at some level or else their entire business model would be untenable. They cannot on one side claim that AirBnB is a safe proposition because most people are good and on the other refuse to take care of their customers because of the one-in-a-million who might cheat them.
Excellent annotation!
100% free cooled datacenter at OVH
Good luck being able to cover all a person's personal heirlooms that cost thousands.
This was covered in a few blogs before, Here's an example from fooducate: http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2009/05/31/on-orange-juice/

There is also a response from the Florida dept. of Citrus there.
Update: the same article can be found online here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9aac5f80-b924-11e0-bd87-00144feabd...
Interesting. I've been considering working towards it, but if competent security professionals think it's a joke.... :-)
D'oh -- I got hit by an auto-playing video ad. Turn your sound down before clicking, lest you wake the cat...
I think this proves that the model of cheap, social housing will not work. The only way to provide the level of security that this woman is demanding is to dramatically increase the cost of the service or the housing to cover the risk.
Sunk cost fallacy. Sublime Text doesn't cost any more for people who have already paid for Textmate than for people who haven't. It doesn't have fewer features, or run slower, or crash more, or look worse, for people who have already paid for Textmate than for people who haven't.

The only thing that's different for people who've already paid for Textmate is that they already have Textmate. That might, indeed, make Sublime Text less valuable to them. But the person you're replying to already knows that, and is asking: What reasons might I have for not switching?.
Indeed cutting out carbohydrates is the easiest way to loose weight in my experience too.

Please note that we are not talking extreme measures here - there are plenty of carbohydrates in food. We're talking getting rid of the crap variety. Avoiding or completely skipping starchy foods (white bread, rice, potatoes) is the key to controlling blood sugar levels. It's not about avoiding sugar drops - its more about avoiding blood sugar spikes these foods cause.

Please note - that potatoes are not necessarily bad - if you eat them whole (much easier with young potatoes) and add extra fiber.

But sugar, white flour and rice are horrible, horrible foods.
Only Telus. Bell and Rogers are free incoming texts - or at least were, when I bought my phone (I have unlimited texting, but I like to make sure). However, that's not to say they don't try to jip you at every possibility.

For the last few years, texting to the US had always been at the same rate as Canada (and covered by texting plans). Rogers decided to switch that on me when I wasn't paying attention... although I'm pretty sure I asked, and the Sales guy lied.

In either case. One complaint to the FCC in the USA, or CCTS in Canada will get things your way. Both countries, from my experience, has pretty terrible customer service. I can barely understand half of Verizon's CS team, and one guy at Roger's CS actually told me I should just do nothing, even though I felt cheated, because "if you sue, our company has more money than you, and you'll lose for sure". Sigh.
Skype update enables account theft
Sure, if you install a surveillance system or have a doorman/reception area, you can get a decent insurance rate. Also, you have to buy insurance in 6/12 month chunks, even if you rent out the place for 3 days a month.

All of a sudden the rates that greedy hotel chains charge don't seem so greedy.
The auditor has a hugely inflated ego, something that might be a sign you're dealing with a narcissist. It's a pretty huge claim to make that you've "been in the industry longer" than anyone else, but that's the sort of thing you'd say when you're that kind of person.

Everything they said is surely made up, and if you challenge them on their facts, they'll attack you in return.
The Firefox address bar can be set jump straight to the "I'm feeling lucky" result instead of showing search results when it's confide t enough in the search.

That behavior alone, which for some reason nobody else replicates as a feature of their browser, kept me using FF for years longer than I would have otherwise. The FF address bar is still best in class in my opinion.
America's economy - Distress signal
The HTC Desire was the best phone I've ever bought. Especially coming from an iPhone 3G, which was very buggy and slow.
A Stuxnet Comeback?
Given that they control the communication, the implied business model is that trustworthy people will be using the service.

If they truly expected these types of incidents to happen a lot, they would require more information from people (to be able to trace and hold visitors accountable) and have some sort of legalese to ensure that they would never be held liable.
Here's an example - the G-Man advert:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818407

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819411

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820611

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821072

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821210

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821635

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821985
"Not all Androids are created equally."

That, in many ways, is the nub of the problem.
1. How do you reliably extract forename+surname from a single name field

You don't. You should never tell someone that their name is invalid. it's their name
Hahaha , great invention
I know....twas a joke.
I don't think there are many people who are seriously using both vim and emacs equally. Fully mastering either of them costs years...
The thing with CouchSurfing is that the guest is not generally alone in the apartment--it's a more social interaction, where the host is entertaining you, showing you around, etc. In Airbnb's case, the guest is left alone in the apartment, and there isn't as much interaction between the host and guest.
I like Smalltalk, but like Forth and Lisp it's just not practical in most of my computing tasks, career or hobby-wise. It's a shame that Smalltalk didn't evolve enough to challenge Java in the '90s. But my buds that knew it well and also had some C chops are in demand as Objective C coders.
To some extent, you're right. Bruteforcing the password becomes a case of first bruteforcing the kernel by searching the much smaller password space of lowercase letters, then once that's matched using that kernel to generate candidates by altering case, adding digits, etc. Obviously a smart search will immediately try uppercasing the first letter, and adding a 1 to the end, and in a lot of cases that's going to be right. So yes, it does reduce the strength of your encryption against bruteforce password search, by several orders of magnitude.

This is where advances in hashing approaches might negate that problem for you, though - and you'd need a proper cryptographer to figure this out. If it was a plain MD5 or SHA of the normalized password, you're absolutely vulnerable to an attacker using a rainbow table of lowercase alphabet words figuring out the 'root' of the actual password; then they could use that to construct password candidates to hash and compare to the full password. But just adding a big block of salt to the normalized password though would take it out of the pure-lowercase searchspace and force you back to bruteforce searching of the (admittedly small) password space. However, multiround salted hashing strategies like bcrypt rule out rainbow tables and allow you to tune how expensive bruteforcing is, and even though the password space of the password kernel is limited, you may be able to turn bcrypt up high enough to make it unfeasible to bruteforce.... maybe?
The auditor specifically said "plaintext". He's clearly a moron, but there's no evidence that he somehow thinks plaintext and hashed are the same thing. He specifically said that the passwords should be stored in a "recoverable format for later use". He wants plaintext.
Every Startup Founder Needs to Create Good Risks
You should clean all data you get from the user. You are already doing it, unless Bobby Tables is messing with your database. You should just add in another layer.
Already requested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2511824
> I don't understand why Airbnb aren't as rigorous as regular rental companies?

Because they wouldn't be profitable if they were, it's too complicated and doesn't fit in their model. The regular rental companies would soon copy their model outpace them if they went that route.

Did anyone ask about this in their YC interviews? ;)
On veganism... I only know of one person who was full-stop vegan for more than 10 years. And even he had major health issues, due to absorption problems of some nutrients.

He found a source of said nutrients that works for him. Everybody else returned to a balanced diet.

I do understand that some people can function on purely vegan diet. However most do not.
This is a similar problem to what goes on with PC vendors. They install crap-ware and borderline ad-ware on machines they sell to users who then complain that their brand new computer is already going slow after a few months. Even re-installing the OS using their provided "recovery" discs will re-install all this junk after installing the OS. Luckily you can circumvent this problem pretty easily with a PC. Not so easy with a locked-down phone from Verizon. Too bad there's not many wireless providers that don't pull this kind of stuff.
WordPress Support – The 10 Best Sites to Get WordPress Help
Installing and using WordPress is quite straightforward and you do not need any programming knowledge in order to do so, but even the most experienced webmasters and web developers have had WordPress related questions at one time or another.
Music of the spheres: http://oeis.org/play?seq=A053381
You seem to be confusing what the term "relevent" means re: down-voting. (or perhaps just want down-voting is for)

down-voting is a community moderation tool, to be used on comments that are off-topic, trolling, spam, etc.

The article in question is about AirBnB's repsonse to the situation (or rather, about EJ's comments about their response to the situation). The comment you down voted is making a point about a possible reason they may be acting that way.

It's a direct and thoughtful response to the topic at hand, it's ipso facto "relevent" in the sense that matters re: down-voting.

The fact that you disagree with it, or think it is flawed is not a valid reason for down-voting; instead you would reply refuting their point. You seem to think that their comment is not "relevent" re: how one considers their actions...and that may be true...but that is not a valid reason to downvote and not the sort of relevance that matters re that.

I only bring this up because many people seem to be confused about down-voting, or abuse the system and I think it's helpful to have a dialog on it occasionally.
Spam is a solved problem. If you're seeing that much spam you should re-evaluate what filters you have working.
Crooks? Someone that would seriously vandalize someone's home is not really a "crook" but a victim of some sort of mental health problem. There will always (in any area of life) be a small percentage of people who do that sort of thing.
I once saw a site that asked for full name and nickname. After I got over the shock of it being different, I quite liked it. It always knew what to call me, and never made assumptions.
Considering the glut of posts from a couple weeks back about Groupon, along with the tone of every single one of them, the only thing I'm surprised about is the SEC apparently actually taking it seriously.
I work for the "man" and lucked out in the sense that there are still pockets of new product development where you get to do some interesting coding that has nothing to do with plugging libraries together. And I get to buy a $10K scope if I need it - happy camper!

But even without funds or a cushy R&D job, I would go farther and say that this is the best time ever for the type of coding the author suggests is more stimulating: for next to nothing I can buy a fairly powerful microcontroller for robotics or whatever, for less than your monthly smartphone bill you can buy an embedded Linux system and do some really heavy lifting.
Missed Out on Google Music? More Invites Arrived Today
In my experience, banks need a lot more than competitive job postings to be places where talented developers want to go. Obviously YMMV, but it's red-tape hell, technologically dated, management heavy, non-creative, and a real daily grind. If it's the kind of job you want, you are much better off working for the Government.

This is exactly what working for a bank IS NOT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
SSL via GPU
Nintendo: Apple's Latest Prey
I love it when a post on HN shows up a day after a mid-morning brunch based rant about the subject at hand. It was my observation during the discussion that if you take away all of the shiny toys that attend what passes for web development these days, your average programmer would be left pretty much high and dry and unable to continue at that point. Having vented at that point I backed down and admitted that this was a VERY old argument that always takes place as things change. Further that I really couldn't see any good reason why things should be done the hard way. I even used to make jokes in my code where main or the equivalent had a single function called 'just-do-it'. The fact that I started out with IBM 360 BAL is totally irrelevant to today's programmer and should be. I do worry about cases of 'what happens when': even the best calculator is worthless if you don't know how to lay out the problem. But that is a a minor problem/objection. I also find it interesting that my 'antique' knowledge has provided employment for precisely those situations he mentions in the article: I can easily 'glue' together the output from one black box to another. No one needs to worry about the boxes in question; which is good since often they are inherited and are either a mystery or are quite fragile or both. My code in the middle is typically quite short and very easily modified to meet changing needs as necessary. So as much as I might rant and rail about 'In my day', I'm actually better off today than I was then. I also note that much of the toys I mock are in fact written by programmers with the same bent as I have---much rather write a utility than an application :)
To believe that only 1 party or segment of 1 party is at fault is absurd. Someone posted an interesting video the other day: http://www.kpcb.com/usainc/

An alternative story to Fallow's is:
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/07/28/the-truth-about-obamas-b...

Which shows that Obama is more to blame than Bush, which is different than what Fallow's used in his article. Situation is normal as each side is blaming the otherside.

I think if you look at the make up of congress when significant increases in deficits occurred, it might give a better indicator.

John Mauldin has a book called Endgame, which is worth reading through Interlibrary loan. It presents some interesting ideas.

But what it comes down to is that the US is acquiring debt faster than is recommended. It is possible to correct the issue, but not sure the political will is present to do so.
That won't solve the abysmal coverage and dropped calls enjoyed in the US.
There is no such thing as bad publicity
I keep meaning to write a blog post with some details on this, but as with many things, I usually end up coding instead.

Sublime Text 2 is almost entirely C++ (with a smattering of Objective C for Cocoa and Python for plugins). Coding is generally fairly straight forward: code on one platform (mostly Linux at the moment, but I switch around frequently), and then make sure it still compiles elsewhere.

Sublime Text 2 itself uses a custom UI toolkit. There are a lot of apps where this may not make sense, but it's not such an unreasonable choice for Sublime Text, where I always knew that a lot of the UI controls were going to have to be custom no matter the toolkit (e.g., the text control and tab controls). The UI toolkit sits on top of a cross platform abstraction layer, which is more a union of platform functionality rather than lowest common denominator.
"But if I'm not on the front page, above the fold, no one will (read my articles | (see|buy) ads)!"

It's a constant battle between the ad department and the content makers, and then between the content makers themselves.
There is ample opportunity for technical solutions to ordinary problems. It does not need to be "big/huge" to be successful. Good luck.
Show HN: Weekend Project - Keep Calm And Read Hacker News
One of the big things about running a business is about being flexible and adaptable - particularly for a startup - there is even a cliched word that is bandied about for extreme examples of this - pivot.

The whole 'but if we do this it sets a precedent, it breaks our business model' is just an example of inflexibility. The circumstances that EJ is going through is not an outlier - it's a fundamental problem with their business model!

Pretending it doesn't exist, pretending that they can protect their model by not helping EJ isn't going to make the problem go away.

The only thing they should worry about now is making sure EJ has everything she needs. AirBnB's business model will no doubt adapt/change/pivot over the course of the lifespan of the business and few people will remember what it was in the past. What people will remember is their integrity and reputation - two things that AirBnB are burning to the ground at the moment. From the outside at least, it looks like AirBnB is focussed on protecting the former, when in fact, they should be protecting the latter.
As an 'area code' it now makes a lot less sense, but we still need that many numbers to be able to have 1 for everyone, so it'll still be that long, no matter what it's called.
> Airbnb & YC, just fix this please:

Second that, and please do not try to instruct the victim in a way that can be construed as trying to cover things up, 'the cover up is worse than the crime' will come back to haunt you big time.

> 3. Help her find her irreplaceable stuff. A few private detectives and a small team of scouters can make more progress in 2 weeks that the SFPD can make in a lifetime. Publish pictures of her grandmother's jewelry to enlist a giant army of spotters.

Yes, and if what was written about 'a suspect is in police custody' was nonsense then apologize for that publicly and get it behind you as soon as possible. If it wasn't connect EJ to the right person at the police department. Your stories not being 'in sync' is a huge problem.

> 4. Hire her and pay her well (perhaps even with equity). She is obviously an excellent writer and an empathetic persona. But more importantly, she is an expert in addressing what is clearly the weakest link in your business model's chain.

That's one I really disagree with. She's not an expert in anything, she's a writer. AirBNB should not hire her, they should concentrate on fair compensation and then have her get on with her life as soon as possible. Any associations with AirBNB will likely be traumatic for her past the point where she's been compensated adequately.

After all that's done (and it should not take more than 72 hours starting now) if she comes around and writes a blog post on how great you guys handled this in retrospect that's great but do not ask for it and do not ask her to sign an NDA, it will make you look bad again.

Finally, make a point of linking to this story prominently (and how you dealt with it) from your terms of service / signup page as an example of how bad it can get (and let's be really happy she wasn't raped or killed, this is not the worst that could have happened by a long shot) and that you were able to fix this once but given that the people that own inventory on AirBNB have now been warned make it perfectly clear that you will not be able to do so again.

You may have to scale down a couple of notches but it's better to be sustainable at a slightly lower level than dead.
Microsoft's Web map exposes phone, PC locations
> In the US, almost all phones are bought at carrier-subsidized prices - i.e. much cheaper than buying the phone standalone. The catch is that you have to sign for a 2-year contract with that carrier to get the subsidized prices. The prices for mobile phone plans in the US are much higher because they include the phone subsidy.

it's the same in most european countries (and has been for a decade or so), and even in countries where this is not allowed (such as belgium), plan prices are not significantly lower.

Although generally you have a sliding scale: most euro countries have laws letting consumer break 2-years contract for a free (which is usually a function of the number of months left on your contract), so you can usually get 12-months contract (lower subsidy => more expensive phones) and no-bind contracts (even lower to no subsidies). They're also generally more expensive per month: having you as a pretty much guaranteed customer for 2 years is much cheaper for the carrier.

There are also bits and pieces of regulation which varies by country. In France for instance, subsidized phones are SIM-locked but carriers must let you unlock it for free after 6 months.
Certainly with Java (speaking from experience going back to 1.0) and most certainly with major language/compiler releases like this one (see 1.5 previously). Java almost always requires a dot-release or two after a major version to iron out the kinks. Which isn't to say don't try it, but try it in development with low expectations. On the other hand, they're usually very quick about turning out the next few dot-releases (I'd wager that it'll be 1.7.3 by September, unless they continue with the silly 1.6.0_xx version format in which case 1.7.0_03).