skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Survey Says Facebook API Has Most Headaches and Horror Stories
Great so now we soon would find a xkcd-brute-force-attempt-list.txt
Why would a I pay $2 to a website when for more or less the same I can invite a female friend to a coffee and talk about the issue as long as it's necessary?
Very few sites have a short max password length. I use 1password, and of the 63 sites I've stored passwords, all but 2 allow 25 character password lengths. Ironically, my Bank only allows me 15 characters.

I haven't typed a password in 3+ months - don't know what any of mine are anymore, so I find typing is no longer an issue.
Is it possible that the breached Sony passwords he was analyzing may have been cracked with dictionary attacks? Maybe the reason only 1% of the passwords had a non-alphanumeric character was that the crackers mostly didn't crack the passwords that had any non-alphanumeric characters.
The real bailout? PPIP? Oh yes, here's how it worked:

1) Bank owns asset of dubious value, classifies it as "Level 3 Assets" which allows it to value it using an undisclosed method that has no correlation with the reality of a burst housing/credit bubble. This also allows the bank to hide its true financial state by escaping writedowns.

2) Market for these assets is dead, especially since government bailed out Fannie and Freddie, driving investors to a new "low-risk" market (government backed mortgage securities) and away from non-government backed securities.

3) Fed offers PPIP to buy up this trash. As a side effect, this effectively lowers the risk of these dubiously valued securities

4) Security of dubious value increases in value, is sold to Fed for profit (sometimes even twice its original level 3 valuation, which already had nothing to do with reality). Fed purchased security using mix of private investor and US Taxpayer funds (such as the Treasury)

5) Fed refuses to reveal the method of valuation for securities, preventing people from knowing how much profit the banks made, and how much the Fed lost out (including US Taxpayer money)

Conclusion: Fed now owns toxic security, bank escapes consequences of poor decisions and/or fraud, Taxpayer money is wasted buying assets for a heck of a lot more than they are actually worth in the real market, barring a resurgence of the housing bubble.
There's something in this idea, as I've often toiled over the sharp edges, but it's not all there.

Take one of the article's linked examples, the "Linked List" patent [0], what are the requirements in "producing the thing?" Churn out repositories all day that print random indices of random length, linked list? This idea seems hard to enforce on software patents, which tend to be the most disingenuous, along with most UI, UX, and form/material patents. Do I have my OS create trillions of glossy chat bubbles every day, on a large distributed network, to protect my trivial patent?

[0] http://www.google.com/patents?id=26aJAAAAEBAJ
Try selecting the text, it behaves funnily in a way that I can't understand!
The Beauty Bias
One of his well-known quotes is: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."

That strategy turned out rather well, I'd say.
Show HN: 1-click opt-out from websites selling your personal information
We're huge privacy advocates; when we saw a post last week discussing how to opt-out from background checks and services selling your personal information, we knew we could add our support. The process of manually opting-out is arduous, time consuming, and serpentine. Some websites offer to do it for you (for up to $500 a year) but don't tell you what they're doing, where, and how.

MELONCARD.com is our contribution. You upload your information once, and then click the opt-out button for the services of your choice. We send the emails, faxes, and forms where possible, and email you pre-formatted and addressed letters for the rest. When you're done, you purge all of your data from our system. It takes 2 minutes, and its totally free.

We'd love your feedback and for you to use our system; visit http://meloncard.com and help us increase privacy for all
Understanding the (Unsurprising) Microsoft Shift on Silverlight & HTML5
The See-Invisibility Exploit in Games: How it works
It's like TED but in Chicago and costs $15: Chicago Ideas Week
And unironically provides a trivial math equation land-grab by Apple as proof that patents are providing value to society, on the other hand.
I don't really have any, aside from the 4-chan approach - send a photo holding up a sign with the date and some random string of characters - but that might also discourage a lot of women.
I have just created a spanish version, that is easier to fork to other languajes. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1990697/pw_gen.html
Two things about patents:

If patent workers are overworked, why don't we replace them with a certificate of origination. You file it, it takes two weeks, it's dated, and it describes the work. Then, if you need to sue someone, you then have to pay to prove that they are infringing. Reverse the burden of proof and delay the cost of approving patents.

Second, my biggest problem with software patents is that you can't build the thing from the description. If you look at a patent for a device, there are schematics and descriptions of how it works. Software patents just say "the user can click a button and it automatically buys a book". Where are the detailed drawings of how the web server connects to the payment system which connects to the distribution center? How do you scale that up to millions of users? That's where the magic is.

Patents are supposed to give the inventor a reasonable period of time to profit from his work. After that time period is over, it becomes public knowledge, so everyone can do it for free. Software patents do not give away the knowledge that it actually takes to build the system. Instead, they typically just describe the tiny bit that is apparent to the user.
That's not what is proposed here though.

The point is that one size does not fit all at the moment.

I guess developers need to change the way they handle passwords.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873003
From my experience in a couple of 'large Indian IT companies': it is a matter being seen by your boss as 'being around'.

Out of an average of the 10 hours put in per day, I daresay only about 6-7 are productive. The rest would be spent in coffee breaks, meal-time breaks, smoke breaks, and sending around pictures of puppies, kittens and babies.

To be fair though, quite a fair number of these IT workers are expected to work standard hours, and then put in at least a couple of hours face-time with the client. The client is [more often than not] either European or American, so there's no real way out.
I like the moo.com mails:

> Hello
>
> I'm Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order
> with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will
> print it for you in the next few days. I'll let you know when it's done
> and on its way to you.

But the from mail it's donotreply@moo.com
Well, even with that it won't be comparable to Chrome I'm afraid. Firefox became very heavy suring the years. And no I don't have a lot of add-ons; I have 2 addons in FF and 15 addons in Chrome and yet Chrome processes suck much less memory even if i run it for days without closing. People switching to Chrome is not just PR, really.
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

http://xkcd.com/552/
For reference, here's the original post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627571
with 20 up votes and some other corroboration of what @IgorPartola mentioned.
Founder of http://meloncard.com here (robert@meloncard.com), would love your feedback
(1) How easy will it be for the startup to find your replacement? If they can they list a position on Craigslist and get a bunch of qualified candidates at $80/hr, that will likely be the compensation.

(2) What is your opportunity cost? If you can get easily get a contract developer job for $125/hr, that is what you "should" be paid.

In the example scenario, a smart startup will try to get somebody with $125/hr talent at $80/hr. The cheapest way to bridge this is by stroking your ego and offering you BS title like "CTO". WTF is a contractor CTO? They will probably not let you attend "real" executive team meetings and vote on important decisions.

My suggestion:
(1) Let them know that your time is wort $125/hr. and you'd take $50/hr in stock (and CTO title). It becomes a good deal for both of you.
(2) Work smart and work hard. Make them offer you a great compensation package to be the permanent CTO.
Why didnt the article cite any sources?Just saying "paper published in 2006" is not very convincing
The People I Want to Stop Running Into at (Videogame) Industry Conferences
Very well said, this article is misleading to say the least.

I take issue with article suggesting that all anti-patent views want that patent system abolished. That is absolutely not the case. The patent system should be brought into line with the rate at which industry is capable of innovating today. Furthermore, software patents need special treatment in their own right. They are simply not specific enough, and it is the generalisation that stifles innovation.

Again, I refer to Martin Fowler's excellent blog post on the subject of software patents http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SoftwarePatent.html
The "problem" described only exists in system folders.
Ahhh, thanks for the details. The only solution I could think of involved writing out a dict like you're describing and using a template helper to look up the modified asset filenames. I was wondering if there was a more elegant solution that was escaping me.

And it probably would've taken me a little while to realize that I'd need to rewrite CSS files as well, so thanks for that, too!
Facebook takes your phonebook, not just your phone number.
Tablets are starting to hold and access the same (and often sensitive) data that PCs do -- essentially putting it at the same threat level as typical PCs that have access to corporate and government networks.
This is an important issue in some chat programs. I had to deal with this all the time: malicious users using i vs. l to pose as others, and using unicode to mess up or reverse the entire chat. One of the more interesting unicode had characters going left, right, and up and down. This confused moderators about who to kick/ban and obscured other users' text.

The solution was to implement a regex of whitelisted characters; since it's an English-only program, this works well and is future-safe. For multiple languages, a blacklist is probably okay, but the difficulty lies in keeping the blacklist both complete and up to date.
Goodbye blank nodes
Significant discussion from three weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786114
The Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books
Getting people to opt-in doesn't make much cents for them.
Lots of discussion from three weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786114
What is broken beyond repair about the patent system as it stands today? As far as I am aware there are two problems patent length is too long, and the patent office is approving things they shouldn't. Both are easily fixable. First shorten patent terms to say 5 years. Second revamp the patent office so that fewer bullshit patents get through, perhaps a filing fee instead of an issue fee among other things.

Sure easier said than done but no harder than convincing the country to do away with patents altogether.
There should a be very good reason why you would want to relocate your developers from Israel to the US.

Marketing guys? Sure, assuming you're in media or consumer web. You need your salespeople as close to the customer as possible. But why move your R&D to the US?

Developers wages in Israel are not even close to what a dev in the valley, or in NYC can make. Junior devs start out at 15K NIS/month ($4250) and the cream of the crop can make up to 30K NIS/month ($8500). Totaling to anything between $50K and $100K yearly. What does that get you in the valley?

Not only that, I would venture to say that finding the tech talent in Israel is easier. The mentality in the startup scene here is still not a cut-throat one. If you look hard enough, you can find the right devs you need.

Having said that, the startup scene in Israel still isn't as vibrant as you would think, at least when it comes to consumer web. The classic strengths of the Israeli tech scene have always been security, enterprise, IT and hardware. Consumer web? Google-scale? We're not there yet.
In general I suppose they'd have to provide a commercial library that is available to developers to use.

In this particular case the patent office should have laughed and rejected this patent outright, along with the rest of software patents.
It is ridiculous that after a long rumbling defence of US software patents he offers as a solution learning from various EU countries where IP works. He conveniently forgets to mention the reason why it works: no software patents.

However, his canned history of software patents is very revealing. It shows a clear thread of the patent office caving in and sacrificing its principles under the pressure from "big shots" wanting to make even more $$$$$, supported by the courts. If any patents are to work, the patent office rules must be well though out and protected from lawyers' pressures. After all, the lawyers are profiting from the troll's shark frenzy that they helped to create.
Ask HN: What security issues should I be worried about with Node.js?
I'm thinking about writing a website in Express.js with MongoDB. What types of concerns do people have and how much of a threat is Server Side Javascript Injection?
Correlation is (or should often be) a call for scientific inquiry.
What does that site have to do with developer dissatisfaction with API's?
Stock market driven by fear & greed. Startups are fearless
Another edition of "Let's pay attention to what the rich man says."
Annoying that Marco seems to have taken many of his talking points from This American Life's "When Patents Attack" episode -- without attribution, and mangling the facts in the process!

Toast patent -- featured in the episode.

Saying IV shell companies only sue people -- misrepresentation of something in the episode; companies affiliated with IV sue people, but some IV shell companies may only be used to acquire and license patents (thus their shell companies do not "only sue people" as Marco says).

Marco does not address the popular notion that software patents should be wholesale dropped as a way to fix the problem.

So what is the point of this article?
>What you did is expressly against the terms of use of Facebook.

Yeah, I think we all know that. It doesn't mean that we're going to agree with them. Yes they were in "the right" by booting him, but that doesn't make it any less of a shitty policy.

>It's for real people, real businesses, etc..

Yep, wouldn't want to add any noise to that delicious advertiser signal!
New leukemia treatment "exceeded our wildest expectations"
That's an interesting analysis. I can't really see any major deficiencies with it.

On the plus side, a sentence is probably going to be easier to remember than 4 random words. Personally, I draw some of my "high-security" passwords from literature, but then I modify the case and do the "leetspeak" character substitution, so a naive sentence attack would not work. A more clever one might, though.
and what's the guarantee that it's actually a woman answering and not some greedy male who put up a female facebook profile?
They're not jumping from 4 to 7. 5 has been released; 6 will be released soon; 7 will be released six weeks after that. It's a time-based schedule with a new version number every six weeks.

Mozilla was sick of defining features for a given version and then delaying releases for months because of too-ambitious goals, so they switched to a whatever-is-done-by-the-deadline system. Version numbers aren't particularly meaningful.
Like any other hidden file, it's not rendered until you choose to show hidden files and then at the point, it shows the file, but the icon is semi transparent.
At least for me, the draw for Underscore.js was that array functions like .filter and .forEach are not supported in all browsers. In that case, _().select and _().each are great for keeping the code clean.

I'm not sure I agree with porting syntax over just because one is familiar with it as opposed to learning the language properly.
Engates Jeep Parts & Hitch - por 4 Wheel Drive
The feature you are describing was just committed to Django trunk this a.m. The main docs have not been updated with it yet, but you can view the docs in this changeset to see how it will work: https://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/16594

The author of the new feature is the guy behind django-compressor.
Agreed, I don't have a problem at all with it either. Maybe a particular bug with his developer release and device he's using?
The constraints section of 6.5.2.1 requires that one expression be a pointer. If you cast one of those numbers to a byte pointer with its address at the numerical location in memory, I don't see why it wouldn't result in a pointer to memory location 0x00000017. Give it a shot!
I still sense a problem. While these passwords ARE easier to remember, there is still the security flaw that most people reuse passwords. A key-logger or shoulder-surfer could snag this (or a website could store your password in plaintext and be compromised) and then it's game over. Password managers are the future. They can memorize unique passwords of any length and complexity for every website you use, and they can store the passwords with very strong encryption with 1 key that is memorized. That key is where a password like 'correcthorsebatterstaple' could be effectively used.
No upper limit? Why wouldn't someone set it to $2^1,000,000,000, never produce the thing, it can't be reasonably licensed at that price, and poses the patent for millenia?

If the fixed number of years is longer than the current 20-year limit, this solution is counterproductive.
They've started getting more serious about it. One of their big new JavaScript performance features, type inference, was backed out as soon as they realized it causes significantly increased memory usage -- and it won't get back in until it slims down, despite significant JS performance benefits. In the past, many features slipped in with memory problems and weren't noticed for months or years.
In response to Nillay I left this brief comment:

Nilay, I think your patent exchange misses a key point in software. No one reads them. Nobody reads patents. In fact, go talk to a Microsoft and Apple engineer about patents and they'll tell you that not only do they not read them, their corporate policy does NOT allow engineers to read patents. Apparently it drastically increases the likelihood of treble damages for the company.

You give the PageRank example, missing though that there was work from IBM that was very similar. See this classic paper, "Authorative Sources in a HyperLinked Environment" from 1997(http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home.... The genius/luck of Google was continuing to push this idea of search, when no one else seemed all that interested (recall AltaVista, Yahoo, and Lycos had all seen Google's results and were offered a chance to buy the company -- they all passed. Their genius was in persisting and not giving up and getting their PhD.)

The Apple patent you show is an example of what I call, "Being the first to ask the question". I'm not sure how else you'd solve the problem besides how they did it. It's the obvious way to do it. They probably lucked out because they were the first company to be faced with the question. This has become rampant in the mobile industry. Whenever you have a new form factor, there are new problems. They aren't necessarily hard, but they're new. And the fact that they're new problems means there's no prior art. You can suddenly file a bunch of patents based on your solutions, 99% of whcih are the same solutions the guy across the street would come up with in six months when he happens to hit the same problem. That's not innovation -- that's blocking innovation as it ensures your six month advantage becomes a 15 year advantage (or however long patents expire).

Nobody in SW reads patents. Furthermore patents are actually very hard for those in the field to follow. They use non-standard jargon. I'd much rather read source code or a CS paper to get the ideas -- as those are usually written just by the actual developer, and not translated by the lawyer.

And an unrelated, but important point, IMO. SW, unlike most other endeavors, is something that people rapidly build on. People still take aspirin today, in the exact same form as 50 years ago. No one uses a piece of software in the exact same form as 50 years ago. The closest is probably vi, but even vi has had significant code churn over the past 30 years -- it's quite possible that it currently shares no lines of code from the original version. SW evolves rapidly. Patents seem much better suited for fields where inventions can stand on their own for significant periods of time.
> OAuth (oh wow, do you hate OAuth)

If you hate OAuth, try DSSID: http://dswi.net/
rxvt-unicode, despite being perfectly able to display unicode characters (hence the name), drops the RLO.
Robot Finger Spinoff Models Microscopic Details in 3-D
No, we know the purported benefits of patents. His point was that we don't know whether the benefits outweigh the harms.
How DailyBurn Broke The Law And Owes Me $4500
How does the exoskeleton prevent you from falling over when you pick up or hold a 500 lbs weight at arms length?

It seems like this would be a major factor when center of gravity shifts as it does not compensate for it.
Still don't understand the fad for "programmer-friendly" languages. Why on earth would you even start learning to program if you didn't find something diabolically fascinating about learning a new syntax for symbolic computation?

C, C++, APL, etc. all seem perfectly "programmer-friendly" to me, once you've learned them...
重庆保健按摩
There are hundreds of better ways to pack & deliver your sarcasm.
HIV virus used to turn white blood cells into cancer serial killers
This kind of misses the point.

A password doesn't necessarily need to be something that is easy to remember. It just needs to be a unique token that is easy for you personally to present when needed.

I currently use a keepass file stored in my dropbox folder. I am not certain what the silver bullet to online authentication will look like. However I suspect it may not require you to remember more than one secure password, perhaps not even that.

Trust online is hard though, looking at the problems establishing trust online reminds me how clever human beings are, we sometimes make mistakes but we are pretty good at evaluating trustworthiness in the real world.
Filesystem performance tends to degrade when you have tens of thousands of files in a single directory, so programs that manage thousands of files usually end up dividing them into many subdirectories. It's not just Firefox - git uses the same strategy, for example.
I'm not sure what the title is supposed to mean. FTA "The solution is simple, of course: we just have to add a real software patent section to Title 35. " I guess he's trying to say the patent system isn't broken, but here's how I would go about fixing it.
Is Maruku's metadata syntax supported? http://maruku.rubyforge.org/proposal.html
The ease of finding developers in Israel is the reason why a lot of the companies I talked to (Outbrain, BillGuard, Taykey), started by folks out of the IDF, take the hybrid approach: keeping their R&D arm in Israel, and biz dev sales here. They can't afford/worry about not finding developer talent in NYC. But they move here to get close to their customers, like you said.