skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a web app version of PromoterApp? (i.e. webapps instead of games)
It still works with irrational exponents (start with fractional numbers and work towards that).

So why e^pi * e^e = e^(pi + e)? Yes, it follows from the fact that it works for rational numbers, but in order infer this, you'd need to prove the continuity of exponential function, which is nontrivial at best.

Of course, if you define a^x to be the unique continuous function f: R -> R, such that f(1) = a and f(a)f(b) = f(a+b), as soon as you proved the existence and uniqueness of this function, this follows straight from definition.

There are also different definitions of exponential functions, like exp(x) = lim n->inf (1+x/n)^n, or exp(x) = sum_{n=0}^inf x^n/n! . How easy it is to prove now that exp(pi)exp(e) = exp(pi+e) ?
Do tell...are you a Ruby developer by any chance?
Wow - Some (all) of the images on the homepage are really NSFW.
I tried using oDesk because I thought it would speed up my development. It didn't.

I'm sure that the people I engaged had the skills, but unless I had a daily conference call the project just got way off-track. It started off as bi-weekly, conf calls - I'm not an obsessive micro manager, besides I don't have the time for that, but it was quickly apparent that they were doing the absolute bare minimum, and actually not strictly following spec.

I gave them a bit of leeway to fix the stuff, until I realised I was being taken for a ride, nothing was really being delivered.

I think I spent about 250 euros, nothing really, and I ended up taking the project back and finishing it myself, in a week.

I'm not saying my experience is everyone's, but my advice is only give very small tasks, specify exactly what you want them to do, don't expect them to do any thinking, and they only seem to work if you have the time to micro manage them. Check the screenshots very carefully. That will tell you if they are working or not, and finally make sure they actually deliver something to you at the end of each week.

Lastly, make sure they are in a similar time frame as you. I'm in Europe, and had Indians. Half their day was over by the time I got up, which meant I lost a day when they'd gone off track. India works for the states because they are beginning their day during the US day.
My most secure passwords are for Twitter and Facebook. I don't really use either anymore but I don't want to delete them as they contain some history.

The problem is that both position themselves as one login for tonnes of services. I do use Twitter to auth into services from time to time. This is why a strong password is important for these. An attacker could get into your account then cause some serious damage to your reputation both amongst your friends and to the outside world by authenticating themselves into one of the million services and acting like a prat.

I know that one of 3 passwords is compromised. All of my friends know it. Even some of my friends of friends know it. So far I haven't noticed any of my accounts being abused. If anything I have noticed friends using it as their memorable password :)
The sentence goes on 'but very rarely'. In fact, don't think it's happened once this year that I know of.

Bottom line is, well, the bottom line (that startups have nothing to fear when it comes to trusting us).
and one other thing... that's why I think a co-founder is so valuable. They share some of the load, meaning that at early stages you can move quickly on development.
If it does not degrade gracefully, throw it out, the internet is meant to be useful, it's not a playground. (BTW, no disrespect to the author, when it work's it's mighty neat!)
There ought to be a way to run your tabs in the cloud... I'd pay for such a service!

The only downside is that I would need to invent some kind of SQL variant to find stuff among the tabs, as they would no doubt soon number in the thousands.
An 1869 MIT entrance exam was posted here a while back and the typesetting was similar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967040

http://bm98.posterous.com/did-they-have-latex-in-1869
> Referential integrity implies a closed-world assumption where transactions on the database are serialized by (conceptually) suspending the world synchronously, applying the required changes, and resuming the world again when referential integrity has been restored successfully, rolling back any changes otherwise. Assuming a closed world is, we claim, both a strength and a weakness of the relational model. [...] The closed-world assumption, however, is in direct contradiction with distribution and scale-out. The bigger the world, the harder it is to keep closed.

This is the first time I have heard the expression "Closed World Assumption" used to refer to transactional atomicity.

For example, the Terry Halpin textbook "Information Modeling and Relational Databases" describes the CWA thus:

> When modeling a business domain, one may take different positions with respect to the completeness of the information captured in the model. The Closed World Assumption (CWA) is the assumption that all relevant facts are known (i.e, appear in the model, either as asserted facts or derived facts) and that all the relevant business rules are known.)

I find this discrepancy in academic terminology difficult to reconcile.
I think it's not about maturity, it's about having reasons to know. School can kill ones's interest in pretty much everything, as soon as your curiosity gets replaced by tests, grades, homeworks, rote, memorizing etc. But it's a long topic, covered on HN many times.

For me, most of the school subjects were utterly meaningless. I didn't understand then why could I care about how we produce electricity, where are the resources located. I didn't see any use for learning about kings and battles of the centuries behind (the only date I really remembered back then, is the 6th of June 1944, Operation Overlord; Second World War at least seemed interesting to me personally). Or genetics. Or social things. Or entrepreneurship. Or whatever.

I don't miss the school per se. I only wish I put up with crap back then, I wouldn't have to learn some this stuff right now the second time.

I still believe the subjects, the way we're taught, are devoid of meaning. To pick one example, physics and geography classes contain enough of knowledge for people to make smart decisions about complex subjects, which scales up in democracies to nation-level. Instead, we see e.g. young mothers boycotting the construction of nuclear power plant in Poland, or whatever. Society seems to be unaware as of where do we get power from, how much do we need, and why it is a damn important problem. People only complain about gasoline prices going up; but hell, if the society doesn't care (or, doesn't even understand enough to be able to care) about energy, how can it expect politicians to care? It's a lack of mental picture of issues the world is dealing with. And energy is only one example.

I remember being taught all those things in school; I didn't really understand anything back then, and I think most of the people didn't. Things like "renewable" / "not renewable" resources were to me like Lisp symbols. Their only meaning for me was in tests, like: (member 'coal renewable-resources); get it wrong, have 0 points. Somehow, between grades, tests and homework, the real meaning of things we learn got lost.

Anyway, I wish to go once again through the school material, this time for real, and try to extract some meaning out of it for myself and others around me.
Ours just sends an SMS with a one time code for each operation.
Payment is done primarily with Bitcoin. Goods are delivered primarily using the post (and rubber gloves).
Call me old fashioned, but I think notes of different topics shouldn't mingle with one another, and dumping all your notes in one file is a recipe for creeping disorder.

Depends on the volume of notes. Trying to do any kind of manual sorting on my notes is a full time job at this point.
I'm by no mean an expert in passwords/cyrpto and the like but it sounds to me that his idea of generating passwords from the service name and a master password is a good bad idea.

Basically, his passwords are made of two variable strings: one is the service (easy to guess if you're target a specific account, which in his case you must anyway) and a master password that likely doesn't vary much from one identity to another.

Doing this is basically opening the door to anybody who could gain access to his generation algorithm. I have no maths to back me up but I made a quick proof of concept that I ran against /usr/share/dict/words and managed to find one collision in ~100000 tests (I was generating passphrases though).

I'm going to keep on investigating and try to generate passwords instead of passphrases.
The other possible clue is that they seem to have added "The challenge continues" to the home page sometime in the last few days e.g. see http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/dec/01/gchq-computer-ha... for how it looked on or before 1st Dec.
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Try something like 1Password, completely set me free of this stuff.
I suspect not. A comparable modern student would have been exposed to a broader range of ancient history which would also have been shallower and, having been encouraged to "understand" instead of memorizing any of it, would later be left with no real knowledge of anything specific, therefore no real understanding.
Org mode looks very tempting.

Main problem: I'll have to learn emacs :)

But, I've been meaning to learn a serious editor (ie vim or emacs) for a long time now so might as well bite the bullet and do it.
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I wonder how many password crackers have full unicode support?
I was surprised that colinux wasn't more popular than it is. I remember thinking it was a pretty good idea when it was announced.
Is this tool can be used with centtralized mongodb and app server to monitor more than one server ? I like its simplicity.
Entropy tends to increase; in almost everything.
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Shouldn't startups sell themselves instead of relying on PR?
I was married to a doctor for 10 years. Before that, I lived with my aunt, also a doctor.

The one thing that absolutely shocked me is how they thought about aging and death. I kept reminding them their goal should be to find cures for everything, no matter how hard it seems. I approach every engineering problem as solvable. Maybe I can't solve it right now with the tools I have. Maybe I can't figure out a way to solve it and will have to leave it for the next generations. To absolve yourself because something is inevitable is a coward solution.

So, no, thank you. If that's what it takes to survive, I want to be cut open, sliced, probed, and, when everything else fails and I finally die, I want doctors to learn something from my death. I want them not to give up and, if they can't treat some condition, go out and invent a way to do it. You don't give up solving a problem just because it's hard.

It's their job and it's reasonable for us to expect them to do it.
That rather depends on which side of the divide you find yourself.
Minus Ericsson, Sony to only make smartphones
I don't think the issue is the cost to the patient, but rather that in a private payer system, it becomes profitable to keep patients alive for as long as possible. In a public payment system, you could crassly say that keeping patients alive is a cost to the system. Now, that would seem to imply that the public option might lead to early termination of treatment in cases where treatment would be feasible but expensive, and perhaps that does happen.
Few years ago my friend had an account in a bank that gave him security token, that generated a random number every 60 seconds, that had to be appended to password during login. So even if someone sniffed your password, it would be valid only for less than a minute :).

I think it's a great solution and I don't understand why it's not widely used.
I saw a picture of an alien and an old man being a lil too friendly. I wish I could laugh but I fear this will haunt me for the rest of the night.

I've decided I'll now read comments first.
The project I have been involved with over the past 6 months has been quite strange. I'm in Europe, and the company has a team in Hyderabad. The only difference is that the team in Hyderabad is determining the requirements, and I'm writing the code for them. It's a bit of a vice-versa land, especially compared to a few of my previous projects. I think it's quite educational for both them and us, to experience things the other way around.

With developers, you get what you pay for. Good developers in India cost almost as much as good developers elsewhere, and the small cost saving is eaten up by the losses due to distance and culture.
I note that they'd added "The challenge continues" to the http://canyoucrackit.co.uk/ website. I'm sure that wasn't there before...
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less than a minute is more than enough to transfer your money to a place where you will never see it again. ;-)
> The next revolution in transportation will take advantage of this existing network.

There is a simple concept that takes this assumption and adds some personal transit logic to this: busses with routes adjusted dynamically that just pick you up wherever you registered.

I first read about this idea in the famous Pattern book by Christopher Alexander written in 1977. It looks like existence of smartphones and availability of real-time traffic data and cheap computing power add some feasibility to this idea.
Deutsche Bank does this for online transactions. All your purchases and, if I remember correctly, bank to bank transfers require you to refer to a sheet of TAN numbers that is mailed to you when you open an account. It was surprisingly annoying at first but I got used to it.
Payment is done with bitcoin. For the delivery, I think the idea is that even if the package is intercepted and your address is on it, it cannot be proven that you actually ordered it.

I don't know if such a defense would hold up. It might depend on local laws. But it does make sense because otherwise you could get your enemies into trouble just by sending them unwanted illegal goods.
Personal information isn't the only thing worth protecting; some accounts would take a long time or even money to recreate if they were banned. Movies ranked on recommendation engines, games bought on Good Old Games, domains and hosting accounts from different companies, invite-only accounts, etc.

For the 10 minutes it took me to write the one-liner that generates passwords from a fixed seed and the domain passed through an hash, it was certainly worth it.
Yeah, my rule is to give a unique password to any site with my credit card or personal info, email addresses, and social networks that have my contacts (I've seen Facebook used in a scam before where the scammers pretend to be stuck in a foreign country and beg for cash from friends). Everyone else can just use the same password. If that means my reddit karma is in danger when YC gets cracked, so be it.
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Ditto! I seem to bump into you everywhere. The Internet is a small place.

> customers are making decisions about technology vendors based on the ethics and relationship with that company

Indeed. In such a crowded space with plenty of the same feature-wise, there is no doubt that the personality of a company (in this case, conveyed over social media) is going to play this kind of role.

PS: We were doing SaaS in 2005 :-)
Yes, indeed :-)

I did not mean to write an actual implementation, just to make a small point.

In an actual implementation, I'd probably want the type to convey information about the content stored at the address, too.
Why are we charging extra for SSL?
This is much better than password alone - and very nice usability-wise. But it significantly increases the area that you need to trust to be safe. I would not like to have it for all of my accounts. But would be cool if my bank used this system for transactions under 100 euro, for example.
I did what you do until one of the accounts I had with a "shared" password actually got compromised, and then I switched to generating unique passwords for every site.

I actually have to think less about passwords now: instead of trying 1-3 passwords before figuring out which one it was I used at a particular site, I just generate using the site name, no thought involved.

Mainly, the reason for switching was the feeling of insecurity I experienced on discovering that someone else had accessed my account, even though it was an account on the non-essential list. I didn't even know what other sites were using that password, so I ended up deciding to switch passwords everywhere. A few accounts into that process, I just got fed up and decided to go back, switch strategies completely, and forget about passwords as much as I possibly could.

I wrote my generator both as a python script on the commandline and as a javascript web app I host on my domain, so I can generate passwords without access to my computer.
1. You asked, I answered. I did/can not up vote or down vote your post as a result.

2. The OP asked a question, and you questioned why they should ask. More importantly, you merely pointed out that yes, people have, and have not been successful at it.

3. If you intended for something else, you weren't clear. Mostly because you didn't say anything. What you did say didn't amount to something that offered anything constructive, hence the down votes.

> For every successful startup there are 10 unsuccessful (unprofitable) and if stating the reality is complaining then well OK - all who downvoted me has right to live in their rosy dream illusion world where they get rich just by reading HN.

But see, you didn't say that. You didn't come close to saying that. You might think you did, but I assure you, you didn't come close. Your comment wasn't insightful or intelligent. You wanted to know why you got down voted, I told you. Don't try and now pass this off by labelling those who down voted you.
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Actually they're free: https://www.startssl.com/?app=1
What age are Americans typically when they take SATS? The geometry stuff is not so bad if you can give visual proofs, pretty hellish otherwise. I think I had to know quite a lot of this stuff for A-level maths as well as Calculus, basic Statistics, Linear Algebra and Applied Maths. But we take these exams when we are 17 and it was 1 of 3 subjects we specialised in for 2 years. Also, regarding your point about calculators, our exam questions were set so that it generally wasn't practical to use a calculator to solve them. E.g. some questions specifically stated that you should give the answer as surd or fraction, it was generally easier / quicker to do the working out manually.
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Who cares about the list of sites you have accounts? Unless you're paying for goat sex porn, the site names themselves are utterly boring and useless. Attackers already know you have an account on Amazon because you are a human being living in the developed world in the 21st century.
Short answer from my experience is cost. The individual tokens have a cost, then there's the management overheads of running the system. Initially it doesn't seem like too much but if you've got a customer base numbering in the millions, it can get quite pricey.

Obviously if the cost (to the bank) of online fraud gets high enough it starts to make more sense. What's interesting is that some online apps (eg, World of Warcraft) have seen the benefits of providing 2-factor authentication faster than a lot of Financial Services companies.

2-factor auth of one kind or another seems to me to be a good idea for online banking, given the prevalence of banking trojans which have keylogging functionality.
I think the first step is correcting the things you're doing wrong, such as not removing the potential for your site to be showing photos of graphic anal sex on the front page. I'm a bit surprised you didn't 1> foresee the potential for abuse or inappropriate images and 2> fix it immediately as soon as it was brought to your attention.

Being on the front page of HN is a grand thing. Unfortunately you may be not only squandering this chance for positive results, but bringing yourself negative publicity.
In that order. I don't do Hel first because Linux historically has a broken Hel. Mac users often have DejaVu, Bitstream Vera, or Verdana installed anyhow.

OSX users are such a small minority, its hard to find a way to please them without making it worse for Windows and Linux.

That, and I've viewed my website in Safari on OSX, it looks correct (although, like everything on OSX, it has hard to read fuzzy fonts).
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While R&D at Google may be a geek's heaven, the Operations at Google is a hell, an ITIL hell, 200% Dilbert [the ITIL's blueprint is the Britain's state healthcare IT by IBM in the 1980ies]. No wonder that she's snapped.
I've seen this outsourcing problem in a old role I had. For me there were 3 main problems;

- Not adequate training of these guys. I tried to convince the powers to send someone local over there for 6+ months to get these guys up to speed and ship shape but the management feeling was a good set of written instruction will do the job. Sorry, it wont for work roles of any complexity.

- Being remote and in different timezones created lags in turning work over that had to be looked at at both ends. Also they didn't all see the bigger picture or side issues which are important to help understand motivations and then create solutions and value ad in many project as they just had the main brief.

- Cultural differences with Indians I found is they don't like to say they don't know how to do something. I think this is a loss of face not to know or perhaps they are just worried about keeping their jobs. So often if you give them a project and they don't know how to do, they will do something else they do know how to do just to show you they were working. I kid you not... it was really frustrating finding out a week later they didn't know how to do a job so decided to make a new database instead because they could do that. It created problems a bunch of times.

Overall in my experience I found outsourcing is good for jobs where you have clear "A,B,C,D" instructions but for jobs that had to go from A - D and they figure out B and C, your better off keeping this locally. But that said I'm not adverse to outsourcing more complex work as these guys are generally smart and highly motivated. I think the problems I had could have been fixed by rotating local people in a reasonable ratio to the Indian group to keep culture aligned and maintain personal contact.