skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As long as we routinely use dozens of services that rely on "memorable" data to authenticate us, this is as inevitable as people who try to use different passwords for everything writing them down.

Password stores are one possible improvement, but most people don't know enough to use one, and they are probably far too fiddly for most people anyway. And of course, ultimately you're still talking about using a single set of credentials to authorise everything in that case, it's just a different target (which if ever compromised will undermine your entire identity).

Multi-factor authentication is a much better solution, but the technology to make it ubiquitous in a way that is neither excessively expensive nor creepy on privacy grounds isn't there yet.

There are some problems in security that we know how to solve, at least to the extent that no-one has any idea how to crack them directly today and the effort to brute force them is effectively infinite. I'm really hoping that one of these days, the combination of mobile technology and the Internet will provide us with an easily portable device that can integrate with everything and render obsolete the current mess of hundreds of on-line identities, "memorable data" to authenticate for every financial service I use, etc.
Sad thing is, I wouldn't want to be a politician advocating the end of prohibition in Mexico right about now.

EDIT: Or Arizona or Texas, I guess would be the more relevant point.
When considering Seattle, also consider heading across Puget Sound. Here are some nice points for putting a company in Kitsap County.

1. Commuting from Seattle is easy, so employees who prefer to live in the city can. (I lived in Seattle for several years while working in Poulsbo, and the ferry ride was a wonderful time each day to catch up on my technical reading--or my science fiction reading. Or go up and get breakfast at the ferry's dining area and eat it and read the newspaper).

2. Low traffic, much more affordable housing, less noise, so employees who prefer those qualities for where they live can get them by living in Kitsap. And Seattle is just a ferry ride away for when you want the things the city offers.

Of course it is possible to live in Kitsap and commute to Seattle, but that commute sucks because a lot of people do it. If you want to travel anywhere near morning or evening peak commute hours you can have long waits to get a ferry, and deal with lots of traffic.

When you are going the other way, living in Seattle and commuting to Kitsap, it is a breeze even if you are working 8 to 5. I used to arrive at the terminal minutes before the boat was scheduled to leave and have no trouble getting on.
You could pick a different song/lyric for each site.

For example:

Work-related sites: "8 Days a Week"
Travel and Leisure sites: "When I'm 64"
Shaw tests 100Gbps fiber in Canada
You severely underestimate the kind of power and infrastructure these people have.
Give it for good | Where Am I?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because fighting in public is poor form, it doesn't make it acceptable to broadcast the fight to the world as a bystander.
Not really.

The drug lords have invested a bunch of money setting up smuggling networks and equipping mini-armies. Legalize drugs and they'll just switch to smuggling something else.

I agree drugs should be legalized, but it's because I don't like the government telling me what I can do.
I'm not a lawyer but...

How can someone trust you to parse the policies correctly? What if someone sues you for incorrectly interpreting a policy which they then use to make a decision.
Thanks for pointing out the weak spots of the content!

We've posted several compelling use cases enabled by macros (http://scalamacros.org/usecases/index.html) and added some more information to the main page that uncovers the inner beauty of the examples.

Btw, we realize the responsibility of adding a competely new feature to Scala, so every new macro-related idea is being weighed against the complexity it brings to the table. So far we've done away with several really interesting prospects in order to keep the overall proposal simple.
Good luck issuing every voter with a keypair safely.
I'm guessing they wanted to, but this was the closest they could get
This seems to be the first fair response. Sure, they handled it quite well, the letter is well written, but they still seem to have handled the data very poorly. Just because one is a huge fan of the brilliant service(which I certainly am), doesn't mean their poor security should be overlooked. Given the huge problem Sony has had recently, I would have thought other games companies would have been re-evaluating their data's security.
I'd say its possible, but unlikely; and you'd hope its not a major factor in practice.

When you assume that the attackers would have, or could get, at least one account which they know the password for, then if the hashing scheme is something they'll be able to crack en masse, then they are probably going to be able to figure out what the hashing scheme is, from their known plaintext.
Just curious, if it could highlight the offending phrases it used to figure out the difference between selling, not selling, and bankruptcy selling. This way when we put in our revisions we can better help it learn.

Also if you aren't planning on making this a commercially viable product, could you release source code? Things like this make the world better and safer, (not to mention easier and funner.) All in all though it was rather interesting. (Still trying out websites and i see myself doing this until the end of the day at work.)
Two is very young for a language. Scala is 8 years old and starting to gain a larger following. Having said that, does anyone on HN have a good story about using Go in production? Scala can be snuck in with Java. Go is going to be a little more difficult to get in the back door.
Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich's Awesomeness is in the Little Things
Jack Dorsey: Technology Is A Craft
Buy it now, for real: eBay to refer sales to nearby stores
So here is an intersting conundrum, if you look at the distribution of money in the illegal drug business vs the legal drug business, the illegal side provides more jobs for people that the legal drug business won't hire. Ex-felons in general are a case which was recently called out in Richmond California.

Economics aside though, if you use the end of prohibition as an example of what might happen, you might over estimate the speed of commercialization. This is because prior to prohibition there was a thriving liquor business, and that business simply returned (within one generation so people who had run legal liquor stores before where around to run them again). This situation does not exist for drugs, medical pot clubs not withstanding.
This possible, but the profit margins that exist in the illegal drug business would not be replaced. Their smuggling networks & personnel would become a massive financial burden (how long it would take for that financial burden to destroy them is a separate issue.)
Although they theoretically could have, a lot of these hacks are done via SQL Injection, which is a step below having direct access to the machines. You can often leverage SQL injection further to do just that, but it takes more work/luck/skill than just dumping the DB. So it's not a given that they got filesystem access, but we shouldn't assume that they didn't either.
buggy but cool
>...today's society...

Has it ever been otherwise?
It looks like the author at RRW didn't read the article well.
Rascatripas was not hung from the infamous overpass. His body was dumped in town at the base of a statue where other bodies have been dumped in the past.

The actual article is located at http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Blogger-murd...
I always wonder when password cracking tools will take this method into account, and iterate over a database of popular song lyrics, phrases, speeches, and such. I suspect this won't be feasible forever.
Toller post =)
If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong
Cheapest Blackberry from Amazon
Would You Like To Make Money Online In A Home Based Business?
I've actually been somewhat interested in this as well. I've only started fleshing out an idea and playing with App Engine and Amazon S3. I'm actually thinking of offering what I've been working on as a SaaS in the future but I don't know where to start.

I don't want to hijack the topic but I'll be keeping an eye out for any advice anyone has to offer.
Amen was looking for a while
https://getamen.com/about
I know that no one ever gets credit for "I told you so", but last year I pegged the 4-year vesting schedule as risky, and wondered why we didn't see a lot more people being fired just to recapture their stock options: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733107

To me the riskiest part is that you never know how a business is going to pivot, who might end up owning it, etc., so the idea that you'll still be working there in four years is in many ways kind of silly. It always seemed worthwhile to me to negotiate other incentive. Hopefully stories like this will help change the culture a bit so that other forms of incentive become the norm.
Bootstrap has enabled me to work on many more hobby projects than I would have ever done before.

As a student developer with a lack of any sort of design talent, being able to whack out a site with the styling Bootstrap provides means I have to spend less time playing around with CSS, for a much better result.

I guess this would also be the time to plug my SASS conversion of Bootstrap which is ready to drop right into the Rails asset pipeline with no additional dependencies, while retaining the mixins and variables from Bootstrap. It's also a dependency of rails_admin, so you might be using it without realising:
https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass
Flow App Easter Egg
Not to knock Twitter Bootstrap off the pedestal, but Zurb Foundation is also pretty good. http://foundation.zurb.com/

It looks a lot like Bootstrap because it's based off it I believe but it's also responsive and has stuff to handle different device types which is pretty cool.

BTW, I don't have any connections to Zurb whatsoever
Perhaps if you named it something else and had people vote on more frivolous topics like hottest celebrity, best band, best city, etc.? Don't even mention politics at all.
Microsoft working on $250 PC for low-income families
This is a little bit like, oh... Opera writing a blog post about how you shouldn't use Firefox because it won't display any Google page.

...ie, it would be very important and interesting if true, but it's 1) not true, and 2) trivially verifiable as not true.

Groupon works in the precise opposite way of how Womply claims they do; they provide payment to the vendors well AFTER the voucher is used, not BEFORE the voucher is used. Every single point and conclusion made by Womply is not just wrong, but describes a world precisely opposite to the one we actually inhabit.

I have never heard of Womply before, but apparently they're run by fools. At best they have no clue how their competition does business. More likely they do know, but assume that their customers don't, and feel no compunction about lying. Either way...
w3schools?

I'd recommend MozDev.
The new obaz looks a lot better - well done!
U.s. Accused Seven Hacker, Breaker of Four Million Computers
A lawyer could probably advise them quite quickly as to a TOS that would limit their liability from such an action by specifically informing users of the site that the information should not be relied upon. I'm not a lawyer either, but it doesn't look like it would be a big deal to get a good TOS to prevent these issues.
You can survive with no German knowledge if your coworkers target group predominantly speaks English. This is not a given, though.
50 or 100 years ago, the eavesdropper would have known the couple and would have told everybody in town about what happened. I don't really see any significant difference here. This looks like another example of people inadvertently pining for an imaginary past.
This is a very valid concern, and we keep it in mind. Several really fancy ideas were rejected simply because that added too much complexity or could get out of hand quickly. That's why, for one, the main page of the project says that "Scala macros ... cannot change syntax of Scala".

Some people from our team do have a painful experience with Lisp-style macros, so we try especially hard to find a minimally useful yet conceptually clean approach to compile-time metaprogramming (we are sure, though, that this sweet spot exists).

And that's why we stress the importance of feedback and appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Actually, Apple was a start up. Start ups don't all have to share the same strategy.
One of the problems with the new emergent tech scene in South Lake Union is that it's not really workable for on-foot ferry commuters the same way the financial district is.

Yes, it's possible to walk from the ferry terminal to SLU, I know someone who does, but it's quite the hike.
Wireless 3g card
True. Luckily it's a much smaller market to begin with since most of the population drinks and only a relatively small fraction is interested in drugs besides marijuana.

I'm not really worried about the employment angle because cartel jobs aren't productive jobs. Essentially you're freeing up labor for the productive part of the economy which makes for a higher standard of living for everyone.

It might take a year or two to have nicely packaged heroin from well known companies available in pretty boxes in liquor stores, but I think you'd be rid of all the cartel violence within 6 months.
My test case was typing in 'background', since I can never remember the order of all the values. It showed a lot of the border-* properties (but not all of them, background-position, for example), and didn't show plain old 'background'
Norwegians take top prize in startup competition, with a killer presentation
I am not a lawyer either, but saying 'give some stock back and you can stay' would make a wrongful termination suit a slam-dunk.

Announcing it (especially to multiple employees) is about as dumb as it gets.
Associated or unassociated with the press, this "blogger" body comes from somewhere. Corruption is simply a fact of life in Mexico.
The most effective conduit of corruption anywhere is complacency, and lack of inherent disgust.
Traveling a few hrs through some neighboring (Mexican) states?
Then carry a few extra fifties so that you can minimize the average time spent pulled over on your trip.

That didn't sound repulsive to my little ears, it was simply how things worked.
I learned that bit of travel advice from listening in on the adult dinner table at about the same time I learned to ride a bicycle in that very same city (Nevo Laredo).
If TDD helps you achieve your goals faster, which in some cases it can, then use a TDD-based approach. If it's holding you up, making what should be a throw-away prototype take significantly longer to implement, then abandon it, but be aware of the inherent risks.

Obsessive TDD doesn't help anyone. You have all these "test cases" that give you false confidence, and worse, take forever to maintain as you try and improve your product. You can literally test something to death this way.
Go's major advantage is its cute mascot.

At Google, Go seems to be competing with Python. http://www.quora.com/Which-is-easier-to-program-in-Python-or...

Looks like for certain problems that don't need to interoperate with the larger system and don't need big library support, Go can sneak in.
You might be interested in reading my first talk about macros: http://scalamacros.org/talks/2011-09-27-ProjectKepler.pdf and taking a look at the newly posted use cases: http://scalamacros.org/usecases/index.html. If you get stuck, comment here or mail me at eugene.burmako@epfl.ch - I will explain the unclear stuff.
Their power comes from money.
Java Bytecode manipulation : Tools of the trade
What's a typical acquisition compensation package for a non-founding engineer being acquired by Facebook, Google, eBay,etc? Anyone know?
Forum accounts are not linked to Steam accounts at all. The fact that the first sign of the intrusion was in the forum software doesn't necessarily mean it originated there. It's certainly possible that their entry point was the forum software, but simply compromising a forum account wouldn't be enough to compromise a Steam account.
Mail America-Full Direct Mail Service
Mail America, a direct mail consultant, technology and service compnay, offers you the full direct mailing service.
1001 PredictionBook Nights
I watched this happen on Twitter. Hilarious distraction while I was doing some tedious work for class. Definitely didn't expect to see it on Gawker and ABC. Don't think the writer did either.

Now I'm just wondering when people will stop looking at this as some sort of societal commentary and realize it was just one guy having fun on Twitter while bored in a Burger King.
I did rent a house in Nha Trang for five months, so I haven't been in hotels the whole time. I don't think I can do this forever either but it's been fun.
I would say your customers can sue you regardless of what you say in an email or blog post. Using lawyers to hide from your customers seems less than optimal.
I have experimented with Pomodoro, but for me it was actually more because I thought it might be a good way for me to remember to take breaks. I don't usually have the problem of not being able to sustain focus for long periods. Sometimes I do but more often than not, my problem is forgetting to take breaks, a habbit which - as I get older - I'm finding my body less forgiving of.

Whenever I read about people having trouble maintaining focus or I see people around me with the same issue, I wonder what it is about my life experience that may have made the difference. There's a few things that spring out to me:

1. I was introduced to meditation at a young age
2. I spent a lot of my youth playing pen and paper based RPGs
3. I spent a lot of my youth reading novels when I wasn't playing pen and paper RPGs
4. I spent a lot of my youth painting miniatures for table-top war games and playing said war games when I wasn't reading or playing pen and paper RPGs

A common thread I can see through all these activites is that one is using one's mind, one's imagination, more so than having images and entertainment thrust at you by a monitor or TV.

I believe these activities assisted in cultivating an improved ability to focus generally, and particularly to focus on tasks that are not immediately accessible. This focus has served me well in my professional life.
Love it. Can't wait to see how they will incooperate it into Chrome
Moncler Men Jacket Montclar (White) for Sale
Another "me too" to the haven't received notice of this yet, however a link over at r/gaming on Reddit points to this screenshot of the standard Steam Update News splash that pops up every time you login to the Steam Client.

http://i.imgur.com/EcEUJ.png
What I don't get is how come there are no such violence problems with drug cartels in the United States where surely they must be as large if not larger since the drugs get somehow distributed there (I'm assuming there's where most drugs handled by Mexican cartels end up).
Twitter Bootstrap is great tool for solo devs to do rapid development.

I have built http://smacktweets.com totally on my own in a few weekends. I'm someone who is pretty terrible at design and while smacktweets.com shows it, Bootstrap has definitely helped me maintain some level of "slickness" in my initial design.

I will probably eventually get a designer involved and wouldn't be surprised if I bailed on bootstrap at that point in favor of an entirely custom front-end but for rapid weekend development it's serving me very well.
If the data involved here is public at every step, save for aggregation and distribution, let's hope another entity steps in to take on this role.
> Sorry but real mensch in tech never has its database compromised.

It's nice to imagine but that's not really how the world works. Perfection is impossible after any system reaches a certain level of complexity. The technical security implementation might have been airtight, but then a human factor compromised things in the end. Tough to say. Nonetheless, "be perfect" is not a reasonable strategy – or expectation.

> Valve should have improved its security after such an incident.

You've typed words here without really saying anything. Improved it how? Who's to say they didn't? Until and unless Valve gives us a post-mortem, we'll have no idea what the cause of the breach is. Nonetheless, it may include factors they never thought to consider.
I'm glad to hear that anyone at Zynga is meritocratically given a chance to lead, rather than it being based on how early someone got in. Looking forward to hearing more about the process that will be used to determine whether Pincus should stay on and retain his shares, or whether he should be replaced with a different leader.
Hijackers use knives, guns, tear gas in ops to steal 6K copies CoD:ModernWar3
>does anyone on HN have a good story about using Go in production?

http://tinkercad.com
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/tinkercad-raises-1-million/
(HN user kaib can say more)
They could implement pseudonyms RIGHT NOW. All they have to do is stop paying people to harass their users. They can pay a lawyer to change the policy document later.

The reason for the delay is not because it's difficult to implement "not caring what people call themselves", but because it's difficult to implement some craptastic "you can call yourself what you like as long as we know who you are" bullshit.

Feh!
One thing that I wonder about is the tech scene in Seattle: is it very Microsofty, or is open to things like Ruby, Linux, or Lisp?
Two other significant downsides of Berlin are that there are no mountains around, and it's so far north it's rather cold and the days are very short during winter.
Lesson #1: Which words in a sentence need to be capitalized.
if you're not using multicast in pub sub, you're establishing individual tcp connections between nodes, it's not any different than doing N point to point communications, whereas with multicast, the data is only copied when needed, your data will fan out if that makes sense with your network topology I think if you look at the picture it'll be clear

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast
I'm assuming they refer to somebody breaking the encryption algorithm, not brute-forcing their way through them.
Apple Gives Out $400 Million In Bonuses To Its Top Employees
If we assume drug lords are in it for the money and/or power they'd cut their losses ASAP.

For any of them that are really in it for the thrills the time would depend on their reserves, but I doubt it'd last longer than a few months for any of them.
Registers and pasting yanked text into vim command line
In the past 2 months, 3 of my friends have left Ontario to go work for large tech companies in Seattle.
I think the point on the violence being reduced is a good one. I personally am in favor of legalizing drugs and allowing market forces to compensate the changes in societal risk; for example for people who are convicted of driving under the influence their insurance goes up and eventually their license gets revoked. Alcohol and cigarette taxes funding outreach and education efforts etc.

Given the various occupy activity, and the quantity of money that drugs influence, it seems like the 1% would figure out how to move all that money to them if they could do so without risking being arrested, extradited, murdered, Etc. Perhaps an unintended side effect, or perhaps not, but until recently I hadn't given a lot of thought to who would benefit most financially from such a change.