skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The web stack in Python got dramatically better in the past two years: just take a look at Flask, Werkzeug, requests, class-based views in Django, etc.

There were major improvements in deployment, too: Fabric and supervisord are maturing very nicely.

Once you've nailed the CRUD part of your startup down and want to start slicing your data in interesting ways, you have extremely powerful and easy-to-use libraries like nltk and numpy at your disposal.

Finally, Python continues to get a tremendous boost from the fact that Google uses it to write sample client code for their APIs.
I'm a multi-monitor desktop software developer needing the features of Gnome classic in 11.10. I performed apt-get install gnome-classic-fallback , then edited /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf to set user-session=gnome-classic.

I plan on upgrading two Ubuntu servers the same way.
Feynman used the term "cargo cult science", and others later used the term "cargo cult programming" to describe this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

Several weeks ago on HN I came across this slideshow: http://www.slideshare.net/olvemaudal/deep-c which sparked some debate as to the merits of deep, complete understanding of one's environment. I believe that those who do not have a broad understanding invent their own miniature cargo cult to get by -- or perhaps it is that they are willing to cargo cult and therefore do not develop a deep understanding?

Whatever the case, it's incredibly common in the world of software.
I hate fear-driven cultures where presentations/meetings/casual talk with the CEO are treated as a gladiator match. In addition to Bezos, of course Jobs and (from what I read) Gates created such cultures. Another interesting, lesser known example was Col. Robert R.MacCormick, the editor for the Chicago Tribune for long years. He was described as "remote, coldly aloof, ruthless aristocrat, living in lonely magnificence, disdaining the common people... an exceptional man, a lone wolf whose strength and courage could be looked up to, but at the same time had to be feared; an eccentric, misanthropic genius whose haughty bearing, cold eye and steely reserve made it impossible to like or trust him." [Interesting anecdote: He had all the walls of his penthouse office at the Tribune covered with dark wood, including the door, so that after your meeting ended, you would have great difficulty finding the door to get back out, suffering under his humiliating gaze.]

That doesn't mean that such draconian cultures are unsuccessful, just the opposite. The problem is, success becomes very much dependent on the quality of the leader(s), e.g. compare Libya and China; the performance becomes very brittle.

The main paradox of humanity, of course, is why people continuously create such fear-driven, hero-worshiping hierarchies, although it causes great personal stress to them. Belief in a strong, super-genius, infallible leader that we can never equal and/or please, may be ingrained in our brains, be it religion or, as in this case, CEO worship.
toast76, lots of people open coffee shops because they're seduced by the dream of hanging out in a cute little cafe all day. They aren't necessarily dedicated to putting the best damn coffee on their customer's tables. More importantly, they neglect to richly imagine that other crap that comes with running a coffee shop.

I wrote an essay a while ago, very similar to this one, only I cited people who actually fell prey to what I called The Cute Little Café Syndrome:

http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-follow-your-passion/
BitTorrent Throttling Internet Providers Exposed
This has been pretty common knowledge for a while.

A lower cadence yields increased raw muscle power, but legs will also tire much faster.

This is why you see pros, who race for 6 hours at a time, with cadences > 90rpm (Lance Armstrong is known for a super-fast cadence of 105rpm). Yes, they could technically go _faster_ with a lower cadence, but their legs will fry way sooner.

A higher cadence is sort of a happy medium.
HP Pavilion Slimline s5730f PC (Black)
Overheard nuggets of product wisdom
Someone can probably manually access this in about 8 hours. 4 seconds / attempt = 7,200 guesses ~72% chance to break in. (Assuming there is no built in lockout based on failed attempts.)
That 6-7% is 6-7% of the offering price, not the day's closing price. So the statement "In this way the bank could artificially jack up the new company’s price," is the opposite of the truth: in this way, the bank lowers its fee in exchange for a first-day price increase. That's marketing: Goldman wants to be able to sell the next IPO, so they try to pay off their customers. And that means they can promise e.g. Groupon that they'll have enough buyers.

As usually, Taibbi is vaguely correct (investment banking is a middleman between two groups that are individually worse-informed than the bank is). But he either doesn't understand how this actually works, or deliberately obscures the facts in order to make his point slightly stronger.
Which others are we talking about and how big are they compared to apple of '97 (in manpower, layers and departments)?
If you believe in the Peter Principle, you might be interested in the Gervais Principle (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/) which uses characters from The Office to wax philosophical about organizational structure. At the very least, the first part is worth a read. It diverges from the Peter Principle in a number of thought-provoking ways.
1. Mozilla is working on this (Boot2Gecko); details here http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20111019 and here https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
Very cool! This makes for some interesting UI ideas. Also, it's not often that you see something this unique in the land of JS plugins. Good work.
If I had to pick one feature, it would be either proper client-side includes or partial caching. Probably the latter, because it's more aligned with the Web mindset.
Usabilla launches mobile usability testing
the whole point is in the "to explain". As far it is a matter of explaining everything is fine and I and others can improve. The problem is when you see 8000 tweets just saying "use bcrypt" without having a clue about what is wrong about another approach.

Note that I also trust that we should try to follow well established and proven standard, simply not as drones.
Al Gore on Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and Apple’s Board
Seems like a better approach would be to identify cities with the most startup "clusters"? Identify a cluster, then look at the population(s) of that census tract or zip or whatever.

Using city-level population just makes small cities look great (Boulder) and big cities look terrible (NYC), when I'm pretty sure there are neighborhoods in NYC that blow away Boulder.
re: cookie management, have you tried Ghostery?
Based on the recent disclosure, even $1 is a high valuation.
World's most sophisticated rootkit getting an overhaul
You'll have to install the package compizconfig-settings-manager, and disable the "Grid" plugin.
Well, it doesn't have to be real time, could be daily. Just check the donation figure and update your page manually.
Occupy Wall Street: Outing the Ringers
Anybody just get a severe jolt of the Uncanny Valley effect?
You make an excellent point about how early imperfections in the algorithms could be fixed as they evolve through feedback, and that this step-process running faster would get us the desired (evolved) algorithms quicker.

But couldn't we accomplish this with distributed processing rather than faster hardware?
Right, but there's a glaring statistical error. Schools are very stratified by skill level. So you may have someone with a 1550 and a 2.5 HS GPA, sitting next to someone with a 1300 and a 3.8 HS GPA. One smart slacker, one hard worker who isn't quite so facile.

Of course SAT scores won't be predictive in that case. You'd want to look at SAT scores controlling for other admissions factors, which is basically SAT scores controlling for every variable admissions cares about, which of course means that no variable in particular has predictive power.

But if you want to see how strongly SAT scores correlate with academic performance, the way to do it would be to take some students who belong at, e.g., ASU, and somehow sneak them into Harvard.
1. Considering most client-side analytics are based on IP address, you will require a large number of IPs.

2. It should not be terribly hard to filter out known open proxies or sessions with a specific nefarious pattern.

Overall, I think this post addresses a problem that doesn't quite exist yet; and if/when it does, it can be addresses in many ways.
When he said to just write Web apps instead of native apps, I thought that was just spin to delay criticism until the native SDK was available.
Ask HN: Contacted by Lincoln Square Advisors?
I graduated from one of the top schools about 5 years ago, and out of the blue someone emailed me at my alum address. He doesn't seem to know much about me other than that I am an alum.

I talked to him more and it seems they are working mostly with well funded startups and hedge funds in New York. I have sent him my resume and he helped schedule me for a couple phone interviews, without telling me in advance which companies he was going to send my resume to.

Anyone has experience with these recruiters? Will it hurt me in anyway by going through them instead of applying to those companies directly?
efsavage, I always used to use variations on your examples. They almost invariably lead to the other person going "Oh" and the conversation dying a grisly death, right there. They don't give anyone any "grit" they can use to get a good footing on a conversation.

patio11-type answers -- Cathedral Thinking answers -- otoh, open the doorway to conversation. They are the statement equivalent of open-ended questions.

I tend to tell people that I "help small businesses kick ass," which is def an accurate Cathedral Thinking answer, but lacks verve. Still looking for my perfect response.
Oh, sweet. Does Groupon remind anyone else of that Simpsons episode where the monorail salesman comes to town?
Not promoting someone because they're too good at their current job is a mistake bad companies make.
jemka, my point is that Dairy Queen has more real technology than Groupon. Their icecream is their product. Groupon has none. Groupon has coupons as a product and that's not a technology. Icecream is!!
$200k in office space is one thing, $200k in office space which requires business licenses, typically shiftless employees, health code inspections, constant renewal of expensive but not durable goods (e.g. croissants go bad in a few hours), etc. etc. etc. not so much.
If you want the pure Metro version then just buy an ARM tablet. The battery will last longer, and none of that awkward old-fashioned desktop software will run on it, so you won't have to be bothered by it!
Twas ever thus.
Ben Rich was Kelly Johnson's assistant at the original Lockheed Skunkworks (creator of the U2, SR71, etc) - he was regularly approached to leave and create skunkworks for every other aerospace company.

As soon as he talked to them they enthused about the Skunkworks setup and how their version would be better since it would be in the main plant, with it's own set of VPs to supervise it and be properly intergrated into the main business etc.

ps. Read his biography http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d... if you think any of this Silicon Valley stuff is new
I personally think it's impossible to replicate what Apple have done. It's not just one thing that has caused a change but a series of changes starting when they introduced the iMac.

Apple is more of a "love mark" than a technology company. Back in 95, Microsoft was a love mark, people loved it when a new version of windows came out, now people dread it.

People started looking for an alternative and Apple was there, all different and shiny. It wasn't 1 year that turned them around, its the result of 12 hard years.

Microsoft released a tablet back in 2000, did anyone care? Apple does it and millions rush to buy it, they have created a following, this is not easily replicated. They innovate, amaze and move onto the next thing. There is nothing simple about this process.
Rather than signing requests for the (largish) javascript file (which would benefit most from being cached), it would make more sense for the signed-timestamp key to be passed as one parameter via the image grab. Or am I missing something?
Why computer voices are mostly female
Are there any practical (mathematical?) techniques to measure "openness" of a startup community's network?

You may be 2-3 degrees from John Doerr, but the question is, could you actually get a meeting with him?

Just my intuition, having lived in the Valley (8 years) and Austin (10 years) is that the Bay Area gets a B- for openness, compared to Austin which gets an A-.
If your salt is something like rkD'O:$|tW:kU}SPuuLZ/X(iwtQzVG" then you've kicked up the size of the necessary rainbow table exponentially, or forced them to compute a custom rainbow table for _just_ your salt.

It's still better to be using a slower hash function, but a good salt helps.
Pretty cool. I will definitely use it in my projects. Thanks for sharing.
Banco revives tower push
This smells like admitting failure and running for money rather than going through the pain of improving their business model. The novelty is wearing off.
Exciting projects in Network Virtualization
> GDP does not account for the externalities that the study took into account.

Externality estimates and valuations are notorious for reflecting the biases of the estimators.

Estimates that are a large fraction of GDP are very suspicious.

Do you seriously believe that the clean air act "saved" 1/6th of the US economy?
I wonder if this is why Apple started showing their little 'how its made' videos at the end of new product announcements that have often featured Ives talking about design.
The poor developer's job scheduler
Grave-robbing DARPA satellite to form new orbiters from dead equipment
Sounds like a big ponzi scheme with the stockholders being the last one on the chain.
The opposite could also be a mistake: What if you promote that person to a position it is not qualified for? (I think the Peter Principle was already mentioned around here.)
Investment Banker Quits to Pursue Speed Skating Profession
This story has nothing about hacking but relates to many of the topics discussed here. It's basically the story of an investment banker, who is motivated by the 2010 Olympics and decides to pursue a sport he's never before participated in.<p>I remember reading about a guy who's applying the 10K hour rule to golf as a personal experiment, and people here seemed to draw many parallels to their pursuit of programming proficiency. This guy is pretty much pursuing the same 10K hour experiment but doesn't know it.
I don't think Ive wants the CEO position. He has his dream job right now, and he's the best in the world at it. And he's certainly been well compensated for it.
Unleash Solar
Play with IntelliJ IDEA EAP build
X-Request-Id tracking and TaggedLogging in Rails3.2
Another way to look at it is Clojure is a reification of his thoughts on simplicity.
How to Prevent Someone from Breaking into Your iPad 2 with a Smart Cover
It's more secure because if someone else has the password "justinbieber", and their salt is "ihate", then there will be two different hashes. The attacker will have to crack each individually to find out that they have the same password, instead of getting two for the price of one.
I also don't think this guy actually implemented the spoof he talks about..
Probably against the T&C's of the affiliate program as well, where the company, reading this, might get back to you for a claw back.
At least, that's what I would consider/investigate if I was the affiliate manager.

Al in all, clever
+1 for Flask. I recently replaced a huge, bloated SOAP code base with around 200 lines of Python with Flask. I don't know if there is an equivalent with Ruby, but Flask is a pleasure to work with.
Run for the money...
If you don't use a salt, I can use one of the freely available rainbow tables online to look up your password from the sha1 hash. If you use a salt I cannot do that.

However, if you use the SAME salt for all your passwords, if I compromise your database I simply have to generate my own rainbow table of sha1(salt + actual_password) to use.

If you use a different salt for each user, I have to calculate one rainbow table per user, which is much more time consuming. That said, one user (an admin) is often enough to cause enough damage.
Check Quora's discussion on this subject with excellent insights from John Burgess a former US Foreign services officer.

http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-are-the-potential-...
Tim Cook has been in charge for ages.
You could take everything you just said and apply it to Sony in 1980. Then their founder, Akio Morita, retired with poor health and they diversified into lots of sensible business decisions about owning studios

Then some little computer company in California moved in on their territory and began making beautiful, simple, well made upmarket products.
Storm: Distributed and Fault-tolerant Real-time Computation
btw it is important to stress that:

1) slow hash function.
2) per user random salt.
3) everything you want

don't help if the password is "apple".

So also you need:

4a) force users to passwords with required length / non alphanumerical chars, ...

or

4b) relax the security requirements.
Carrot2 Document Clustering Server implementation for Node.js
I think the moral of the story for programmers should be:

If you're putting something in your code that looks like a vegetable, please put a comment on it.

Ten months down the rode you won't remember why that silly looking hack is there and neither will anyone else. It might not be applicable anymore and it might be safe to remove, or it might be holding together something critical.
TechStars get the rock star treatment
You are going to make mistakes at startups - here's why
Interview with Magnets.com CEO Erwin Metius
I'm surprised only one person mentioned "inherit: none" for CSS (that's what they called it, anyway). If you've ever tried to develop a widget that anyone can stick on any old page, you know this: either you go with an IFRAME and your styles are fine but integration with page events and responding to content size changes are hard, or your styles are totally fucked.

There is absolutely no way to "silo" any area of a page from rogue CSS selectors besides using an IFRAME. Even the <style scoped> feature [1] which isn't even supported yet (AFAIK) doesn't really address the issue. The result is that you're constantly building a bigger and bigger localized CSS reset for your widget and trying to win the specificity arms-race against the host page.

I would love that feature.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/the-style-element.h...
Jobs has never taken credit for a design, has he? People who are uninformed just assume it's Jobs, and that perhaps is what Ive is referring to. He probably meant "it hurts when [Jobs] gets credit..."

If you look at the Objectified interview, along with nearly every promotional video that Apple puts out, it's very clear that Ive is the design guy.
That study seems to draw all its conclusions from inner city / low income. I would submit it is not a model for the rest of the country unless further testing is done in other environments.

story: A couple of decades ago I used to work on grants and educational programs. One group came to ND to give a lecture on risk factors. In Minot ND, they told the crowd that "firearms" automatically means more violence. "It has been proven in studies" they said. One member of the crowd asked how many people in the room owned firearms. The poll came back at about 90% with many (40%) owning 3 or more. No history of violence in that crew. They were all social worker types who liked to hunt or in the case of one, target shoot. I got ahold of their source data for studies and found two things. A specific firearm study was never done and all the data came from CA or NY cities.

The USA is a large and diverse place, I am a little cynical of best practices taken from urban environments and applied to suburban and rural areas without add research and being a little more specific on why stuff seems to be working.
This fact alone left me feeling quite a lot better. Now I know Apple is in good hands at least for the time being. Tim Cook is also brilliant at what he does, and I am sure he trusts Ive as much as Jobs did.
Shirts for Christmas Bargains Tommy Bahama Armani from $9 Buy 1 get 1 free
Yes, US. Sorry to make the assumption!

All payments would be domestic, at least at first. But I would love to make it international at some point. Thanks!
I'm sorry if this was intended to be facetious, but I think Yegge's point was that you need to remove some of the information so that Bezos can fill it in himself and not get bored. I don't think the implication is that this quality is unique to Bezos, but it certainly is uncommon.

At any rate, removing every third word removes less informational content than every paragraph: an idea can often be recovered in your case, whereas it is quite difficult to recover an idea if it has been removed altogether.
Already submitted as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134802
Because he doesn't know everything, obviously.

But by the time you've given your presentation, in which you've thoughtfully omitted the long winded explanations that you'd give to someone who knows nothing about the subject, he'll have deeper insight into what you've presented than you do. And that's the true mark of intelligence.
Stuxnet's Son "Duqu" Removal Tool released by Bitdefender
Looks like the site is down. Here's the google cache - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bokardo...
I see what you mean. That will no doubt work for the time being, but it does make me wonder how "future proof" that method is. Calculating hashes for any number of character combinations is trivially parallelizable. Even today, price aside, it wouldn't take much effort to spin up a large number of machines on AWS or a similar service to increase the speed in which new hashes could be added to a rainbow table. Eventually the size of the rainbow table will increase to the point where it would also contain the long salt + hash.
...wut?

That's ridiculous. What evidence is there that there are groups of nefarious hackers out there spoofing analytics data on people's websites? I don't think there is a need for this solution because the problem doesn't exist. If I wanted to mess with someone's websites, there are much better ways than injecting some false data into their Google Analytics.
That looks good. It would be like an affiliate program.

I don't know why I have an aversion to paypal, though. I just want "stripe for payments". I don't think it exists, though.
I remember reading here about the guy applying the 10K Hour Rule to golf as a personal experiment to see if he can hack it as a golfer. Many of you found parallels to your own pursuit of programming proficiency, especially those of you starting "later" in your lives. This guy's pretty much running the same experiment, perhaps unknowingly.
IPad 2 iOS 5 Lock Screen Bypass Vulnerability [Video Demonstration]
I don't think there is necessarily any correlation between being a great businessman and a great human being. Was Jobs the former? Certainly, I don't think anybody would dispute that. Was he the latter? I don't know, and I don't think it's really our place to judge since the facts are pretty murky.

What bothers me slightly is that much of the praise for Jobs seems to equate one with the other. Let's celebrate the man as a visionary entrepreneur, and leave the rest to those that actually knew him.
Lotta Fat to lose? Suggestions to Make you stay Going