skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever your product is in for the long run. For those cases, better temporarily break it than eventually being unable to manage it at all. That line of code no one understand is a technical debt. Sometimes, it is better to pay the debt right now.

I'm currently working on a 2 millions LOC program which never paid its dammed debts, and I weep every day before this holly Big Ball of Mud.
Great idea!

My Python server processes during testing handle 2 signals SIGUSR1 & SIGUSR2.

SIGUSR1 : runs guppy memory usage & leak profiling (http://guppy-pe.sourceforge.net/)

import guppy
_hpy = guppy.hpy()
log(...,_hpy.heapu(),...)
log(...,_hpy.heap(),...)
log(..., <other _hpy info>...)

SIGUSR2 : open an interactive console using rconsole (http://code.google.com/p/rfoo/) and let me log and muck around with live object while the server process keeps running.[NOTE: don't use on production systems, it opens an RPC port that lets anyone control your process remotely!]

from rfoo.utils import rconsole
rconsole.spawn_server()

Then on the console:

$ rconsole
I agree that principals are a result of the system, and it likely goes even higher to the school districts and superintendent. I doubt instituting a merit-based system can be done effectively without transforming the whole system, from top to bottom. I don't know if that's in the children's best interest, or would address the perceived problems. Small changes to address the cases of real incompetence are probably the low hanging fruit, and don't require radical change.
Exactly, I agree 100%. People are out there because they are not sure what to do but know that something very, very wrong.

I think it would be helpful if they had a leader, somebody who could articulate the thoughts of people who are there for the right reasons (to show their distaste of the current state of things).

It is really frustrating to hear the beneficiaries of this corruption try to dismiss the protesters as "lazy" when I think it takes more to get your butt outside and stay there than it does to go to work and do some busy paper pushing.

Side note on the corruption of this country, look at the bay bridge as an example. It's been over 20 years since the 89 earthquake and the bridge is still not completed. How can countries like China and France and Switzerland manage to finish much larger and more complicated bridges in under a year. Corruption at it's finest.
for region to states, I found this - http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0770177.html

Let me know if that is what you were looking for
Make entry in calendar: 4.11 Buy popcorn and set up a real time chart.
I missed it the first time. Very cool, thanks for pointing it out.
If my first exposure to the world of cryptography and information security had involved someone like that, I'd have written them all off as arrogant quacks to be ignored.
When do they expire?
With Google Reader changing is there a competitor looming?
I think they all have too much respect for Steve to change anything like this for a while.
This is moronic. Cryptography is very hard and one tiny mistake can ruin everything. In that kind of situation, do you want to do something clever and new that you just thought up or do you want to go with what's been tried and tested by many?

Anyone can invent a cryptosystem that they themselves can't break. That's why you need a community, over a long period of time, searching for flaws. Going with the herd is exactly the right thing to do here.
While I agree those differences are important I think culture also plays a large role.

Facebook started primarily as a website for college students to share privately with their friends.

Google Plus started by emphasizing that you can choose who you want to share with (including the public) and shipped with a "subscribe-like" feature that allowed technical people to add many of the same tech celebrities that they were following on Twitter. Since it takes awhile to convert one's friends to a new service, for many tech people, reading public posts by these other tech people became the prominent way they use the service.

You can mostly do the same things on each site (albeit at different levels of convenience), but their beginnings help shape how people think about and use the sites.
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/936/
In about a year and a half when Groupon files for bankruptcy.
How to write a book in 50.000 words
I'm not tpatcek, but yes there's a reason why PBKDF2 doesn't do it that way. Because SHA1(SHA1(SHA1(SHA1(...)))) is broken. Approximately 0.8*log_2(iteration count) bits of entropy are lost with that construction.

http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/384
A big reason for this is that what Apple does is very, very _hard_. It's really hard to build physical objects with design good enough to be featured in museums. It's really hard to build your own software ecosystem, from operating system to software distribution to entertainment services. It's hard enough just to do them; it's extremely hard to be great at them.

Even if other companies _wanted_ to replicate Apple's way of doing business, it's like Paul Graham pointed out in his Great Hackers essay: you have to have great people at the top to know how to identify the great talent below that actually dooes the work. Excellence has to permeate the entire organization. Do you see that coming from Samsung, HTC, or Motorola? They clearly don't have the capability, so they get the software from somewhere else, and then make it worse by adding their own differentiating layers.

Google or Microsoft can obviously make the software, but, unfortunately, they choose not to make the hardware, and in my opinion their products suffer for it.
It's cargo cult cryptography. Saying "use bcrypt" is fine, but understand why you say "use bcrypt."
> By the way that report is absolutely wrong. Nothing terrible would happen if we paid off the debt. So there wouldn't be federal treasuries. BFD.

Depends on what you mean by paying off the debt. If you pay off the debt by just issuing a sufficiently large amount of reserves at the Fed to do so, then yes, I would agree. Then you just transform one form of government liability (treasury bonds) into another form of government liability (reserves). No problem there.

But if you're actually talking about eliminating net government liabilities, you're missing the point. Here's why:

Individuals in the private sector want to accumulate net financial assets, if only to save for retirement. Every financial asset is somebody else's corresponding financial liability.

But retirement funds & co. are huge. Who is going to incur the necessary net financial liabilities to correspond to them? Private entities? Why would we allow private entities to run up that much debt? Also, with private entities you always have the problem that people might change their mind about their credit-worthiness.

The federal government, on the other hand, is at the top of the pyramid of liabilities (see e.g. here: http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2011/09/mmp-blog...), and they can easily incur and sustain the required net financial liabilities to allow the private sector to save in net financial assets.

So government liabilities play an important role in the stability of the financial system.

If you run down the federal debt, you end up in a situation like the Eurozone, where the entity at the top of the pyramid of liability (i.e. the ECB) does not incur sufficient liabilities (and in fact, does not have the mandate to do so, for good reason) to support a stable financial system. The debt crisis is a direct result of this flawed setup, and you would be wise to avoid copying it in the US.
Have they announced the underwriters yet for this IPO? edit: looks like Goldman Sachs: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-15/groupon-said-to-cho...
Thanks everyone! For those talking about browser support, the experiment is coded to only work on Webkit and Firefox browsers. Perhaps shortly I will add the -o and -ie prefixes as it seems other browsers are starting to catch up with their CSS implementations.
"Your planetwide pseudo-anarchistic emergent heterarchical meta-movement lacks a clear organisational structure" isn't the most well thought out criticism, whatever you think of their aims.
This smacks of silliness. People are using their development devices as their business and personal phones. This is called out in the developer agreement and every beta software agreement. Don't do that.
Second michaels' reply. I encountered the term in my compilers class in college, so I don't think it's that new.
It certainly breaks UI expectations. Maybe arrows above and below the number?
In Sony's defense, the idea of a modern electronics company owning actual content was an interesting idea, especially as they introduced new media formats. It's not far removed from what Amazon is attempting in publishing and what turned out to be a very successful model for the game industry. Unfortunately for Sony, it turns out that the economics just don't work for music and movies.
Things that get the "best practices" label slapped on them are not inherently "best". At best, they reflect conventional wisdom in a particular field. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom is often wrong, and rarely challenged.

Eventually, things called "best practices" become the basis of hysterical and utterly worthless Pavlovian responses as occurred en masse here.
The wikipedia article on HMAC has a good discussion of why hash(salt+pass) isn't the best way to good.

"The design of the HMAC specification was motivated by the existence of attacks on more trivial mechanisms for combining a key with a hash function. For example, one might assume the same security that HMAC provides could be achieved with MAC = H(key ∥ message). However, this method suffers from a serious flaw: with most hash functions, it is easy to append data to the message without knowing the key and obtain another valid MAC. The alternative, appending the key using MAC = H(message ∥ key), suffers from the problem that an attacker who can find a collision in the (unkeyed) hash function has a collision in the MAC. Using MAC = H(key ∥ message ∥ key) is better, however various security papers have suggested vulnerabilities with this approach, even when two different keys are used.[1][3][4]

No known extensions attacks have been found against the current HMAC specification which is defined as H(key1 ∥ H(key2 ∥ message)) because the outer application of the hash function masks the intermediate result of the internal hash. The values of ipad and opad are not critical to the security of the algorithm, but were defined in such a way to have a large Hamming distance from each other and so the inner and outer keys will have fewer bits in common."

The why crypto works is that cryptographers -- some of the most OCD pedants you will ever know -- find a nano-scale fracture in one small relatively unimportant part of an algorithm, and then wrench it open into a gaping lava-spewing chasm of exploitation and credit card theft.

Please just use best practices, but realize that they will be periodically be updated.
Watching News Break - Gaddafi's Death from Tweet to Print
Because you were unimpressed by the text explanation but mighty be amazed by the actual "stuff".
I didn't see any signs on OWS calling for "bigger, more powerful government".

Changing a tax level on bankers doesn't change the size of government - spending does that. And OWS wants to cut from a bigger slice (defense) than the tea party seems to (domestic discretionary).
I think this is a different context where it does not make the attack harder. Our context is different AFAIK and the approach works.
They must admit their products are insufficient pretty often (just from recent OS releases):

* Twitter integration

* Yelp and Wolfram Alpha to provide responses for Siri

* Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Exchange email & calendar integration in iOS and Mac OS X

* Google/Bing/Yahoo as integrated search engines in Safari

Fact is that Apple prefers to do things in-house where possible, but if they see it in their interests to integrate something else, they will. Pride (or hubris) has nothing to do with it.
How To Get Banned from a Facebook Page - Jackassery on the Interwebs
This culture at Microsoft was captured nicely in Douglas Coupland's book Microserfs.
After Three Years TechCrunch, Some Lessons Learned
Hi - I can relate to this post because I also have an on-again, off-again, "pipe dream" of doing solo work. I really have one big "passion" and that is machine learning - genetic algorithms and related stuff, but don't have a C.S. degree so though I have (some) professional experience in that, not enough to get a research job someplace. So I am currently working in QA automation - its a job, that's about it. I have done (and continue to do) some on-again, off-again website work for relatives. I guess my "ideal dream" would be to expand to enough independent projects to quit my day job and therefore have flexibility to do my own pet research (like monkeys typing Shakespeare, or similar arcane but cool stuff like that, lol). I think inevitably were I to seriously go down that road, I'd have to sacrifice "life style" - I make in the mid-60's per year and so I'd have to "downsize" a bit - a smaller apartment or whatever - and that is acceptable to me - I am lucky as I don't have or want kids so I can "downsize" if I really wanted to. But I think downsizing is really inevitable in this kind of transition so if someone has a significant other, try and get them to be the main "bread winner" for a while, while one gets one's projects going maybe. :-) I wouldn't but I don't really have to, since it is just me so it is a matter of "taking the plunge" and I don't know if I am there yet (am only 30 so still have time). Your point number 2 is more complex. I think the key is focusing on what you like. Personally I really like the precision and control that C provides but have null - read (void*)0 - desire to learn, say, Ruby. So it sounds obvious but focus on the stuff technically you like, not necessarily what is the current popular thing of the day. Good luck, since I definitely "feel your pain" as it were! :-)
You really mean "Why you should explain what your service does persuasively", right?

Almost all pages have some explanation of the service. But there's a huge difference between an explanation and a compelling explanation as you point out.
here the point is that what I suggested was into an RFC but everybody was too focused on pointing me on bcrypt. I'm not telling that you should invent your crypto, also this is stated in the article.
Agreed. I can tell you it was quite tedious to write and would definitely not recommend this approach for anything practical.
If you like that, the same group made another documentary called 'Helvetica' that is all about fonts and, specifically, about the history and ubiquity of Helvetica. It's also available on Netflix-instant and is a pretty good watch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)
What did you use before?
Wow, this is impressive! It brings me back to an article on a French programmer who refused to live in the "rat race" and make more money than he needed. People who live in extreme poverty don't have a choice,. This so reminds me that whatever we have should be used to the best of its potential.
Thanks to the two entrepreneurs who asked themselves if living in that extreme poverty was possible and going all the way to live it firsthand. Hats off to both of them!
Stating the Obvious, the controls define how you consume news.
My first thought was "this is pretty cool!" but wondering who actually needs it. I then had the realization that this is, in fact, a very different way of data expression. It would force you to think not only about what you are saying, but how you are saying it and how to demonstrate the ideas within the text of the document itself and not simply say "Refer to fig 1.1". This could truly present a new way of displaying data on the web. It could bridge the gap between complex animations and simple text. 99.9% of all sites I see that contain some cool animation are completely independent of the content surrounding them. Having the content and interactions married together in a simple way is really something I've not seen too often. Kudos.
Open the dash, then click "More Apps". You should get two lists to browse: "installed apps" and "apps available for download".
I have been downvoted for saying something along the lines of this before, but: I am extremely frustrated with all those CSS3 and WebGL demos on HN. I have yet to see anything that wasn't possible 10 years ago as a native app or as a Flash program. There have been at least 10 of those demos on the front page in the past few months. It's enough.
And he leaves a particular biting comment for the author:

>>

I did not steal the identify of Matt Schwartz. I informed him that his was at risk to theft. There's a difference. Mr. Schwartz's article on me is libelous and he was deliberately untruthful. I have never stolen anyone's identity, and this article is not even remotely truthful.

"After being released last month" You can't even get my release date right, I have been out for months.. Nor did I say the subsequent statement. I also have never been convicted of a felony, and thus am not a felon. Try mastering basic facts before you pretend being a journalist.
-----
Sprint ditches unlimited 4G plans
...and then your customer's credit card info would have showed up on an FTP server in Romania six months later.
Refactoring and removing code needs courage and tact, but sometime it needs to be done. If you have a database that is not properly normalized, the more client code you add to it, the harder it is to normalize later.

The biggest problem with refactoring and removing code is to explain it to non-techy project managers. If you say that the code or the design is bad, you are saying the guys behind it are bad (you or the previous team), which is not very tactful. I usually try to explain that a software system is a living thing, that need some regular washing up. Also, it is possible to explain that the next features or optimizations will take less time to implement after refactoring.
You need to salt each round of SHA-1 otherwise you don't add much security.

You may also want to use SHA-256 instead of SHA-1 and that doesn't add any new dependency AFAIK. Ideally you should use SHA-3 as soon as it's available. SHA-1 is becoming weaker each day...

You may want to offer the possibility to easily replace the password hash algorithm via a snapin (so people who like bcrypt can use it).
Which is exactly the point. He may or may not be "right", but he serves absolutely no one's interests by being a jerk about it.
Simple-Yet-Effective Ways to Improve Your Sponsoring with MLM Training
Yeah, I like to actually picture a any online transaction from retail store perspective where you have people coming in. If you have a retail store and say "Everything Free Inside" on your door, sure you may get lots of foot traffic but almost no sales and lots of pissed off people.
We just have to hit that sweet spot of a really cool product/game/characters.

Sounds like you're banking on winning the lottery. If you want to be a world famous creator of this, then that's what you should aim for. However if you want to run a business, and allow yourself to work full time on this, then you don't need to be a rock star. You can, in fact, support your business fulltime without having to 'strike gold'.
Well, people have already talked about extension attacks in general, but to be specific: I can potentially calculate the state of the hash algorithm after the salt bytes have been processed, meaning I can precompute to reduce it to hash'(pass) — I consider that broken if you intended to create the function mac(salt,pass). If you have a salt per user, then that's not so bad, but why bother guessing?

Cryptography comes down to much more than using the right primitives. You also have to use the right implementations of those primitives (timing attacks), combined in the right ways (double stream cipher failure), and you have to be sure that the properties you want give you the protection you want (CBC without mac doesn't give you authentication). If you aren't using something with a wikipedia page that describes the entire system, and has some papers describing it and suggesting attacks on it, then you are inventing your own cryptography.
Gingerbread is 2.3.x branch, perhaps you meant Honeycomb?

And while it is a little bit confusing, it kinda makes sense. Gingerbread is latest phone release, Honeycomb was tablet-only thing, and with Ice Cream Sandwich they're merging it into one release.
A lot (not all, maybe not most, but some of the louder ones) of the OWS people are calling for regulation of student debt, universal minimum income, and/or universal healthcare.
Reddit Passwords Now Hashed with Bcrypt
I bet that was the intention with pricing the IPO at this number. Otherwise, they'd be more than happy using a lower #.
That's a good point. Jonathan Ive is in charge of Industrial Design and when you hear him, he's talking as a designer.

On the software side, we don't really hear so much about the UI/UX design process the same way we do on the hardware side with Ive. What I mean is that I don't get the same hands-on feel from Scott Forstall when he presents new features of iOS.

I've been curious about who is behind some of the UI concepts and details of iOS but I can't point to a specific person like I could with the hardware. (NB: though I understand well that it's probably not just a single person :))

edit: I was watching this video again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU In it, you can see Jonathan Ive touching the products and you can tell he would personally make sure that it would be changed if something didn't feel right. On the software side, someone has to make a decision on how much bounce the lists on iOS should have, on how fast animations should be, etc. but it doesn't seem to be Scott Forstall. I'd like to hear more from the software/UI designers at Apple.
Interesting points. Another way to convince oneself, is that even experienced professionals are prone to make mistakes.

This is an interesting set of slides that captures the same thoughts:

http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/schedule/attachments/135_crypto1hr.pdf
The NYT is reporting [1] that Groupon was only (!) $1M from breaking even in the third quarter, in part because marketing expenses were sharply reduced.

Also, apparently they're not allowing any current shareholders to sell during the IPO. Fine for Mason and the Lefkofskys, who took a pile of money off the table early, but if I were an early employee I would be livid.

[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/groupon-nears-a-profi...
> understand it.

This has been said in some replies in this tree, but sometime you can take the piece of code you don't understand as a black box, and bridge its behavior with new code, comparing both outputs during a few iterations, then remove old code.
we've been working our asses off.

so it was the royal 'we' this whole time?
Given the transaction costs of credit swaps, it doesn't make sense to trade them for companies as small as Groupon. That's why there are credit indexes, and Groupon is not part of any AFACT. They are definitely way too small for single name credit swaps.

I don't even think they have any outstanding marketable debt instruments.
Who's buying puts?
Sprint to Kill Unlimited Wireless Data Plans
Isn't message center just an email inbox in any case? We used to just send email to a client and the inbox would be your "message center." With html you could even make highly application specific presentations and interactions. I guess the innovation is then embedding that inside another frame to make it part of a larger application.