skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re. point 5 - I worked at a major UK bank for a while and won't bank with them because of what I saw, but I know that in all probability the only difference between them and the people I do bank with is that I've not actually seen how things are at my bank.

That said, we scored somewhat better on the Joel test than Rob's employees - not perfect but we had source control, testers and a bug database.
It's unfortunate that they're unredacted, but doesn't it seem like it would be against Wikileaks' purpose to cherry pick information to release? I mean I thought they were supposed to be about "information freedom", not pushing their own agenda.
That's a good FizzBuzz problem. Broadening the scope from Rwandan CS students, many well-compensated professional programmers in rich nations could not complete it successfully. I know, this is crazy, but we live in a crazy world.

And to those HNers who think that inability to FizzBuzz is a funny story made up by overly cynical neck beards: spend a year hiring.
Google with search filters for recipies
Have your idea made into a movie with this crazy movie contest
The "serious performance issues" you speak of were fixed in core, about 11 days before your post.

See http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/18541
Researchers show ATM theft by thermal imaging
There is no approval process, no central authority. If you want your CA in OS X, you talk to Apple, if you want it in Windows, you talk to Microsoft. If you want it in Firefox, you talk to Mozilla.
Chatty robots go viral on YouTube
How to Run Faster – 3 Great Tips
Cyborg insects generate power for their own neural control
耳软骨隆鼻
> can you do something alternative which allows you to have a like button, but without including third party script?

How about create a JavaScript library that sandboxes execution of third-party scripts by loading them in iframes based off of a different domain? This would allow site owners to embed Google Analytics or FB Like buttons without worrying about the third-party scripts getting compromised or becoming malicious.
First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed
Yes, certainly. This is a constant battle I'm having with marketing/seo people. "Just drop this code into all your pages". Not that I can present much alternative, so I end up caving in ..
Ask HN: Can you recommend good papers on UI design for complex systems?
If the ad code is inserted via JavaScript, then yes, the problem is real. Most ad code is inserted via JS, e.g. Google's AdSense.

But according to https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=... AdSense isn't available over https, so this specific problem of forged SSL certs does not apply here. But if you embed non-SSL code in your httpS page (and I assume that most users just ignore the message that would popup in this case, alerting them that non-SSL code is loaded into the "secure" site) there's no need to do that: just do the MitM attack.
What about as a further peer-pressure type 'good citizenship' patent thing - a voluntary pay $x per patent in your portfolio to a non-profit which uses money to search existing patent-base and seek to preemptively invalidate invalid/frivolous patents. You could have a little badge on your website or some such.
>Using a megabit rates of cryptographically strong random numbers to seed a PRNG would be fine for most purposes.

And that's exactly what the hardware described in the article does for you.
"With all due respect John, I am the head of IT and I have it on good authority that if you type 'Google' into Google, you can break the Internet." -- The IT Crowd
you're perfectly right, thank you.
you got a mistake with your math 500K of 2 million is 25%
uhm, it seems I can't change the title...
Security Breach on Kernel.org
Free video lectures for Harvard's Mobile Apps course: iOS, Android and Html 5
Interview with Steve Blank On Startups, Economy and Europe
The real reason Google bought Motorola
Verizon offers early upgrades while Sprint raises the Early Termination Fee
Hubble finds a star that should not exist
I use Ghostery (linked on the DDG privacy site). Less invasive, should protect my privacy and help against the attack outlined in the blog post.
Virtual oscilloscope
These are exactly the problems that patents were created for to solve!

Yet they don't fulfill this purpose in the slightest bit. Besides, I don't care if some people suddenly stop innovating because there is no longer any money to be made - which is nonsense, anyways. It's the same as the ever so often repeated lie that you cannot make money with free music or software. It's simply the system's dynamics that change.

That's ordinary business.

"Ordinary business" is both everything that is wrong with the patent system as well as quite a few other things on this planet. As I said, citing the status quo to argue for it is a circular argument.

But there certainly was a need why the patent system was created

Yes, there was a need for monopolists to have even more tools at their disposal to control the market. As I said multiple times, patents were never meant to protect small businesses, or help the small, clever man with a clever idea. It's pretty much the same as saying that copyright was made for artists - it's plain wrong.

Patents have always profited those with power and influence on the system, those with much money to file law suits, and those who are already rich. While there might be some success stories of small men or businesses, those are the exception, and by no means the rule.

We'd go back into a much more secretive world.

I disagree. We'd be in a much more cooperative world, since monopolizing knowledge is no longer possible. It would no longer be feasible to work on problems alone in the hope of making money from the eventual monopoly on the solution, as cooperation increases the benefits for everyone. Incremental development based on each others discoveries could lead to rapid advancement of technology, instead of the - excuse my language - clusterfuck of a stalemate we currently have.
Paul Graham, Ben Franklin And The Value of Political Incorrectness
> Safety/legal questions aside
Steve Krug on DIY usability testing  | Interview | .net magazine
Have you attended a university? Did you study computer science there?

If not, how can you make a comment like that.
(TC Guest Post) Do you use crowd-sourcing to validate design?
Automatic Image Montage with jQuery
With MySpace Out, Can Another Social Network Step Up?
For me, this issue again shows the devastating state in which the whole SSL system is in. My browser (and therefore myself) has to trust unknown agencies with totally intransparent policies. The current state of google and mozilla releasing patches and fixes to the already broken system makes it only look worse to me.
Most badass JS you will see today? Distributed chess AI with webworkers and nodejs!

http://chessathome.org/

Please vote for us, top right corner :) thx
The multithreading change, though, will mean that a single instance will wait for multiple I/O calls to return. If these aren't charged, you'll only need to pay for that single instance and nothing more.
I'm not sure if I understand your comment here.

It's 'local', since you somehow need a way to intercept the traffic and there's a limit to the feasibility. Let's say this is 'local' for everyone in Iran.

But going for the certificate Colin suggests broadens the attack quite a lot: Instead of being able to server your own version of GMail/intercepting mail traffic you're now able to inject Javascript into what? 60% of the websites of the net? Basically everyone using Google Analytics now silently serves your code and the browser runs it without warnings.

So local/global is orthogonal to this impersonation 'improvement'. Even if you do this (somehow tricking a CA) yourself in the internet cafe of your choice, you would make the attack so much worse if you don't target a single service anymore and inject your code into as much content as possible.
Find out what is using your swap
I'd be interested in this too, but what kind of complex systems do you mean?
Publishing company Pearson wants people to mash up its content, open-sources API
Of course, the bulk of the valuation is in the startups that have grown enough. You still have vested interest to protect startups while they are small, this is when you add most value anyway.
An inspiring & beautiful talk by Caroline Casey on moving beyond our limits
I doubt they ever reach the point where they have enough performance to run anything more than a very slow demo on an android device.

Replacing the simulator for iOS development is a nice goal though. It is okay, but I found a couple bugs in it that were annoying.
Give that the article recommends the constructive and practical step of downloading and working through an MIT course I think it is clear what was meant was that while Rwandan universities aren't very good at teaching CS there are plenty universities who do a splendid job.

Unless, of course, you are really claiming that all CS courses everywhere are pointless?
How to Build a Lightweight Linux for your Low-End Laptop
Yet people laugh at me for being a paranoid silly tin-foil-hat nerd if I tell them that I browse with Javascript disabled by default and if a site requires it I am more likely to simply close the tab and move on before I enable it.
Actually:

They raised 500K at a high 2M (pre-money) valuation, giving away 20%

The 2M is before the 500K was added, so it is 500K of 2.5M total for 20%.
Apple really doesn't have a leg to stand on, it's probably a violation of the licensing for iOS but other than that what can they sue over?

and it's on github apparently https://github.com/cmwdotme/QEMU-s5l89xx-port
Blackberry Spare Parts
A must see TED talk by Sheena Iyengar on cultural differences in choosing
you did a really good job, I think your project is a perfect fit for the node.js KO
Speed Up Computer
Think of the countless times when your life has come to a grinding halt due to a slow PC and how frustrating the experience was.
I've done that, and it's not what you might call seamless. I tried to make the community its own entity, with its own look and feel. The problem is that the pages are full of links that take you back to reddit.com rather than their equivalent on your own domain. That's very confusing to non-redditors who suddenly find themselves on a seemingly unrelated site, with all the disorientation and styling-whiplash that entails.

It's a neat idea but it needs a lot more polish to be really useful.
Ya, it is a similar thing for sure. The problem is just accentuated here. Two of the four we interviewed had some clue as to get started. The others were pretty stuck right off the bat. And that's (approximately) the best out of 50.

That they don't code at all in school is just inexcusable.
I think it's time to install noscript for chrome.
You sure can't learn CS by only reading a book - the keyword here is only.

Following through good books is an excellent way to learn programming. I don't believe anyone who has followed through K&R would have any difficulty getting through these fizzbuzz questions.

The analogy with swimming is flawed. You don't need to read books to learn swimming(or maybe there is some theory involved - I don't know), but books are a vital part of a CS education. Good books teach you a lot more than what you learn by randomly typing.

An hour in the library saves a week in the lab.
Unapologetic Cheney Instead Should Be Expressing Regret
These are not the SSL certs you're looking for
Do Google even have any offices in the UK? It seems some tech companies have just forsaken the UK altogether.
Congratulations Samsung, you have just re-invented the PDA after all of these years...
DIY solution for arsenic in water
An excellent article on the problem of melting permafrost
Someone, somewhere, screwed up.

It's quite odd. Certainly Assange is quite technically savvy -- he's a reformed (genuine) hacker -- after all. So I just can't imagine him re-using passwords. Similarly, I would have thought that he'd be enough of a control freak to, you know, check this stuff out himself.
I understand that some victims are weaker than others. However that doesn't change the ethics of the matter: stealing from a poor old lady is as ethically bad as stealing from a rich kid. The impact may be greater, but the ethics are just as dubious.

Consider ID discovering a mathematical transform. If Creative signed up to PG's meaningless patent promise, they'd still be asking ID Software for protection money as they have more than 25 employees.
Steve Jobs patents the staircase
Kohana isn't a CI rewrite since 3.0.0. And yeah, Kohana 3.3 will natively use 5.3 goodies.
I use both. It lets me use sites that totally break with JavaScript off (lots of them!) while still nuking external tracker scripts.
The books she mentions in her talk
" Travels on my elephant" - by Mark Shand

http://www.amazon.com/Travels-my-Elephant-Mark-Shand/dp/0879...
Accumulating links and sharing them to selected groups of people are good ideas. Instead of emailing links to your friends, how about post the aggregated list of links to Facebook/G+ as a single post once per day and make it so that those posts will only be visible to people you select.
A more accurate title for this would be:

"Taking a pay cut that is more than the market value of your equity stake? You are probably getting screwed."
(via https://www.facebook.com/ashish007/posts/223031457746543)
"Designing with the Mind in Mind" by Jeff Johnson is pretty good.

But it's a book.
They have an engineering office in central London.
小绅士打火机中国政府网
They have to check the leaks to make sure that they aren't putting any ones life in danger (when they haven't done this in the past their enemies have used it against them in the ongoing PR battle). That takes time.

It also means that they do cherry pick because they have to prioritize what leaks they will check and release first.

They've got 250,000 cables. A small team is going to take a long time to check 250,000 cables.

No doubt they do keyword searches of the cables to find the juicy ones and release those first, but, what you gonna do... release the boring, mundane stuff first? No one would pay attention to you.
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/jobs/uk/

[Edit: Guess how I found that!]
Go read some of Robin Hansen's essays on academia on Overcoming Bias (http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/academia). The real reason is status signaling- online publishing, more accurately publishing that doesn't go through the established gatekeepers, doesn't provide the status that real sources do.
For static, high-traffic, small-size content, doesn't it make sense to load a minimal OS entirely to RAM and serve it from there? Has anybody tried this? (I guess this rules out VPSes...)

Note: This is a variation of a previous comment I made, but a variation nonetheless. Sorry to belabor the point.
I didn't know the forgone loss of salary for equity could be compared with investment that easily. That's brilliant!
> Honestly, this advice applies to anyone anywhere.

A good university teaches you things in a systematic manner, and teaches you things which you won't learn by yourself. It's not that you can't - most likely you won't. Universities like MIT and Stanford have been around for a long time, and a lot of thought has been given to designing courses.

When you are in a university, your whole schedule is dedicated to learning, which generally isn't the case while learning on your own.

There are many problems while learning CS which you will need help with. There are qualified peers and teachers available who you can go to.

Universities make you learn unpleasant things - things which you won't be learning on your own. Most of the subjects require a basic investment before you learn to truly appreciate it(it's true for non cs as well - music, sports, painting etc). When you are on your own, you might very well become discouraged and not pursue it.

Most of the self taught programmers don't understand lexing, parsing, advanced datastrucutres(think red-black tree, b-tree, tries, splay list), various locking protocols, memory management etc. The reason for it is it doesn't take much to cruise through your day job, and they don't see why they have to learn this stuff. But many jobs do demand your command over these topics, and top paid programmers are proficient in these, setting a precedent.
What with Mozilla wanting to build a browser-based OS, the non-existent security measures of the DOM will beam us back like several decades in terms of security. Awesome. Not.
(via https://www.facebook.com/ashish007/posts/280049325344028)
I find it hard to understand how being a Mod of an IRC channel where a crime is being organized and committed could be interpreted by anyone as innocence.

If a bunch of thugs planned and organized at Mr. Smith's house before walking down to the local grocery store and through some illegal tactic prevented people from shopping, Mr. Smith is guilty of 'aiding and embedding' and 'conspiracy to commit a crime'. Even if it's not your house that they organize at, if you are in the conversation with a group of people who are planning a crime, you are guilty of `a` crime. Not particularly the same crime as the people who committed the planned crime, but you are guilty of a crime.

Then she goes on the record and admits to everything they need to convict her, brilliant.
OK, that answers a hell of a lot of questions, thanks!

I also now note that there's a "Contribute" link at the very bottom of your main site.

If I may make a couple other suggestions:

* Fixing the "Development Branch" link on your page (it's in the "Download" menu) which confusingly points to this totally inactive URL: https://code.launchpad.net/~cgb-cs/appscale/appscale

* Making some sort of statement on the Google Code page about your development practices and the fact that the bleeding edge is on Launchpad. People like me go to a Google Code page expecting to see the development site, complete with an active source tree, and get very confused when that's not what it really is.
'Skynet' law comes into effect
I'm aware of this; however, I'm just pointing out the ironic timing of these exploits.

You teach people to fear one thing, and in this case, they leap head first into something even further beyond their comprehension. They need to start teaching Internet 101 classes in middle school.
Do they match users with passwords? Because someone can see your browsing while you're waiting for your friend and your password is a simple one.
Firing laser beams into the sky could make it rain, say scientists
Hrmm.. Maybe, maybe not. I'm certainly not making the argument that you shouldn't read, if anything, my argument there is don't attend university if your professors have no idea what they are teaching, which is the case here.

Obviously, those who write books usually have a pretty good idea of what they are talking about, so gaining knowledge from them is a great strategy.

And yes, there is a belief here in Rwanda that you can learn CS by ONLY reading books.

But to your point, I'm not sure why you rank books so highly, when in isolation they clearly aren't enough. The average student probably won't grock worse case runtimes by only reading about them. Having a lecturer explain it and give examples will help, but actually implementing some sorts and seeing how fast they run on different size data sets is really what is going to drive it home.

But for a great many programming jobs, I would actually make the argument that you COULD do them without reading a single book. Granted you probably won't be building the next map-reduce, but you can still be effective.

Learning how to find solutions online, read documentation (does that count as a book?), and debug, as well as fundamental algorithms are the big skills.
What kind of complex systems?
A number of people have speculated that cables.csv == insurance.aes256 or whatever its called, due to the similarity in filesizes. Doesn't the insurance file predate the embassy cables affair though?
Another way of working things out is figuring out what the probable return on the stake being given is, e.g. something like, say:

• Employee given 1%

• Two additional funding rounds at 30% dillution each bring that to 0.49%

• In a $30 million exit the employee will get $147,000

• Probability of an exit at $30m of 10% (somewhat generous, but let's assume that the company has already raised an angel round and that's being used as a filter)

• So the adjusted value, including probability of failure, of those options is just $14,700

You can adjust the math to fit the startup at hand, but it's generally a reasonable formula for evaluating the value of options vs. salary. In general if you want to join a startup as a first employee you should either push for a larger slice, a near-industry-standard salary or do it for the experience (say, if you're interested in starting a startup of your own down the line).
Facebook Pages Mastery: Tips To Get Started with Facebook Advertisement
The NYT has taken to churning out one of these predictable trend pieces about once every two months or so because they know the predictable ire and outrage it will spark. No matter how good or bad an economy, you can always cobble together 4 or 5 anecdotes to generate predictable outrage. Notice that every time, there's a notable absence of any kind of hard statistical data.

The truth is, unemployment among college graduates currently is at 4.3% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm) which is historically high but not overtly so.
Be aware of URL limits [0]. Try to find out exactly what encoding is acceptable in major browsers too.

[0] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/HTTP-414-Way-Too-Fing-Long.a...
Which tech journalist can you trust?
Boingboing have a grab of the section of the book where the guardian leaked the password: http://boingboing.net/2011/08/31/wikileaks-guardian-journali...

Amusingly it's been available in the google books preview all this time.
Nginx 301 to external url
Memoir of a failed startup
All vendors want market share in the Netherlands, so a few Dutch CAs get on the list; and they all want market share in China so the Chinese Ministry of Information gets on the list.

No browser wants to be the one which doesn't work with someone, somewhere's bank, so once you're on one list, you tend to get added to all of them; and it becomes nigh-on impossible for marketing reasons to remove anyone from the list ever.

15 years later, browsers have 80 CAs and 200 certificates built-in.
I choose point 3. - not too many layers of abstraction but rather a bad abstraction model which, sort of, results in 1. (bad algorithm). Not because an inexperienced programmer did it, but because the architecture makes an efficient algorithm impossible to implement.

The best example that comes to mind is the "n+1 selects" problem in bad ORMs: if your ORM hides the power of SQL joins behind a crappy abstraction, then you need n selects for what could be achieved with one.
Legal Compliance Training Online
Build your professional knowledge by taking one of the CPD Interactive online courses. If you need some legal ethics training, a unit in practice management, skills or substantive law.
Do we all realize that Mark Z... is actually a single founder ?!
But comparing to the opportunity of somebody else is irrelevant. If the employee has 500k to invest, they're free to get the same terms as the investor. It's about scarcity: apparently the founders think that finding an investor with 500k is harder than finding the tech guy. Ergo, the investor gets paid more.
The maddening and true tale of one failed startup, as seen through the eyes of a young developer, told via a series of blog posts.

All questions, comments, and criticisms welcome.

It's only partially completed, there are several more installments to come.
Awesome, but doesn't work with lost iPhone prototypes.