skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Feral cats are a massive problem in rural Australia. They decimate small native mammals. The idea of introducing them to control rats and save native animals is insane - the cats would wipe out everything smaller than them.

Introducing a foreign species into an ecosystem has failed spectacularly so many times I cannot believe people still propose it.
Having rebinding of the vars and dictionary literals are really nice. The syntax feels a bit awkward in general. Commas have to be in non-obvious places, and the "do" keyword is essentially hard-coded. But these aren't huge problems. The homoiconicity looks quite interesting.

The bigger problem is that it still has 90% of Erlang's semantics, and that turns out to be just as different in Ruby-like syntax as it is in Prolog-like syntax. I should note that this isn't a problem for me, but if the aim is to make the language more familiar to others, the syntax change is not much help.

My team and I evaluated using Elixir for game scripting on an Erlang-based engine, but ended up passing because if we were going to teach the scripters Erlang semantics, we might as well just use Erlang. We also looked at LFE and came to largely the same conclusion.

But, I applaud the effort and I plan to keep an eye on the project. We need more of these kinds of developments on BEAM, and hopefully some of their good ideas will trickle into the Erlang language itself.
Vessel - SKIDROW
How is it not a security hole? Does it not expose critical data with ease?

Walking away from an unlocked machine isn't the only scenario that would expose personal login data this way.

Also, my post refers to a more general use of Chrome. I would hope that a government installation might have several layers of security on top of any application in order to prevent these holes from being exploited.

The "Uncle Pete" example is a very real and plausible scenario.

The fact that nearly anything on a computer is hackable isn't the point either. I kind of draw the line at the stage where a precocious ten year old can steal your data while jumping on one foot and whistling the latest Lady Gaga song with one hand tied behind his back and one eye closed.

If that doesn't define a security hole I don't know what would.
We install a little script that runs at boot up to page us if /.expected-reboot isn't present (or removes it if it is). Then, to reboot systems, we run expected-reboot, which is a tiny script that touches /.expected-reboot before calling shutdown.

Wouldn't have prevented this but would likely have paged this unfortunate soul when his machine rebooted unexpectedly.
Now the State dept will get out of memory errors too!
Dividend is generally taxed at 30% in Sweden so a fair bit of that will be paid in taxes. Depending on how Notch decides to pay out the money to the employees they may have to pay even more.

If it is paid out evenly and as wages it will be about 66k SEK/month per employee, that puts them well into the top tax bracket. Assuming the tax authority counts it as normal income they will be force to pat ~56% income tax a fair bit of social securities and employer tax. Assuming this they might get about (as a guesstimate) 20-25k SEK/m or 240-300k SEK total, after taxes. Not shabby at all, that is close to what an average worker in Sweden earns per year. And that is bonus alone.

None the less; Cheers Notch for thinking about your employees! : )

Edit: Gifts are no longer taxed in Sweden, luckily! but it is likely that the tax authority will regard it as income or bonus rather than a gift.
Record Exec Says Google Music Is Losing Users. But Is It Worth Saving?
I don't know how it would work out in this particular case (there might be other juridical complications) but Sweden has no taxes (any longer) on gifts.
There is: KeyChain on OS X does this correctly by encrypting the file and asking for your account password when you want to view a saved password.

It might not be 100% hacker safe, but it is 100% employee safe at my workplace, which makes a world of difference.
Pitfalls in Unit Conversion: kg -- nuclear weapons
I think that saying that Java has "obvious deficiencies" is rather missing the point. It is not so simple that Java is a bad language and Scala is a good language- they have different features and different design goals.

Java was intended to be a small language, (in comparison with languages that came earlier, like C++) with unsurprising semantics and syntax. Java does not have operator overloading, unsigned types or multiple inheritance (in the C++ sense), and these omissions were intentional- to make code easier to understand in isolation and easier to reason about. If you want a language which can express as much as possible in a line of code, Java fails miserably. On the other hand, programmers around the world have built and maintained enormous codebases in Java, suggesting that the "maintenance-oriented" features of the language may have been successful.

edit: Paraphrasing, James Gosling has said that the success of Java was to drag a large number of C++ programmers "halfway to Lisp" by cleaning up undefined behavior and introducing them to garbage collection.
Gifts are no longer taxes in Sweden but it is likely that the tax authority will regard it as income (Or bonus) and they will pay 50-56% taxes on the lot. Quite tricky but I assume Mojang has good accountants that will work it out!
The photo on Wikipedia is pretty low res, as are most other images I could find. This one is the best one I could find: http://www.fotopedia.com/items/caha118trhdlg-M-cFKeb7a90 These two are also good: http://www.gore-ljudje.net/informacije/60348/

Looks literally out of this world.
Taylormade rocketballz
Global Wealth Proction: How to Save Your Money | Entrepreneur Stories
The reason is more economical than technological. The most popular languages became popular by holding the strongest appeal for the lowest common denominator (LCD) of coders. For example, Java bests Haskell in this regard because LCD coders have a greater appreciation for loops than recursion. The LCD coders become a source of advertising by word-of-mouth and also become a potential market for other developers to tap into. Then project managers see the software being released by the better developers and keep hearing the word-of-mouth in favor of the language and decide to have their software teams use that language. Basically, it's the "snowball rolling down a hill" effect where the LCD coders make up the initial snowball.
i do a lot of Erlang work - my consultancy - Inaka - has production apps in Erlang for Fortune 500 companies and startups - and I'm constantly looking for Erlang devs. Also, I have some ruby devs. I'm always trying to get the Ruby guys into Erlang but what I've found is that the concepts of Erlang are such that by the time you've learned the VM and processes, and atoms, and lists, and what a term is and what OTP is, you've got Erlang syntax down. So... I agree, I never actually have a need to teach Elixir. But, i REALLLY want it to work - it's a brilliant language and it's picking up where Reia left off - Reia is essentially dead now that (though not just because of the fact that) Tony works at Basho... so, I want to promote Elixir at the same time that I'm a huge potential user of it and don't (yet.).

My only thought about how Elixir could take off is if someone writes a killer web framework in Elixir and that starts meaning that the mixed apps we're always writing - Ruby on Rails web UI with an Erlang Web Services framework on the backend (that the iOS and Android apps are talking to) - could be just running inside the Erlang runtime. There would be no more need for that little piece of our deployment running Passenger - which is always the most fragile piece. That could do it.
I think this might have been the most helpful 500s post I've ever read.
My password was randomly generated, has 85 bits of entropy and, it took me only a couple of days to memorize.
I don't think I'm missing that point. To use your analogy, if I was buying a house:

1. I want to see prices when I browse listings. This is fairly normal in real estate, even though prices end up being somewhat negotiable. Why not in enterprise software?

2. I want a decent amount of information before I even pick up the phone or write an email. If you were listing houses for sale, it would be foolish not to include some photos, the location, the size and number of rooms, etc.... I don't want this information in a mixture of PDFs, MS Office files, flash animations and such. I want HTML pages that are easy to read, copy data from and email to others.

3. If I'm buying a house, I probably want to see such things as inspection reports and maintenance records. These things should be fairly easy for me to get even if they're not on the public website.

Someone explained to me that one reason companies selling enterprise software are so eager to get someone on the phone to sales rather than browsing the website is that they then feel they have something invested in the process and are less likely to back out[0]. Having always been the nerdy type, this idea was very foreign to me, but it seems to be true from what I know of the average person. I also learned from an early age how to recognize and respond appropriately to salespeople trying to use emotional and psychological tricks to manipulate me. I sometimes have an unreasonable expectation that others will do the same.

[0]This is a variation of the sunk cost fallacy.
Trying to find some official information to figure out the status of our own 'nodes. :-(
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Canada's Hottest VCs: The Feds and Provinces
Generally the thief copies the wallet (private keys) and transfers the BTC to his own account. It's not necessary to delete anything.
Ça ressemble trop à un défi. Y a combien de $$$ sur ce contrat ?
Well, having the whole disk dm-crypted is kind of secure I guess. At least I still have no idea how I get at my ssl certification keys from startssl, although I have a dd of that drive in question from the vps provider. I was just too clever thinking of a long passphrase and too stupid to keep at least a hint around somewhere..

Total dataloss for me. But i fyou _do_ remember your dm_crypt password, I think you're safe against these kind of attacks
This is an interesting article.

I am primarily a PostgreSQL guy who does all sorts of things like hierarchical data representation in SQL. While these things have come a long way in the past few years. This being said, the more I read about NoSQL data modelling techniques, the more it occurs to me that some of these techniques may work well in relational data environments where data is read-frequent/write-seldom.

In LedgerSMB (http://www.ledgersmb.org) we already use key-value modelling in cases where it makes sense (system settings, and a few other things).

Currently what hierarchical stuff we are doing wouldn't benefit from the ideas in this paper, but I wouldn't rule it out for some other things in the future.

I guess what this is reinforcing for me is that NoSQL and SQL models are not entirely mutually exclusive.....
You could fly to Lord Howe Island with Qantas from Sydney. I looked at doing it but it is very expensive and so is accommodation when you get there. Although now I might reconsider just seeing Ball's Pyramid would be reason to go.
I think everything could be as simple as installing a browser addon (including the node.js server). The dotjs extension for Chrome already starts a ruby server so it shouldn't be too hard to start the node server.
So this is actually interesting to think about. YC will accept a company that has already been through one program and accepted a small amount of funding?

I wasn't sure if this would be looked upon as a good thing or a bad thing to be honest with you.

Appreciate the dialog!
Or just copying the key and "spending" it before anyone else can.
> "Sometimes you just have to let people fail. It's quicker than opposing them."

This can be incredibly annoying if you're on the other side, though. One of the most effective ways of killing a project can be to support it publicly but then do nothing at all to move it forward. Anything at all to avoid having a difficult conversation.

It all depends on the situation, I s'pose.
Linode will send you a confirmation email if you access the admin panel from a "new" IP. This guy must have had his email address compromised as well.

Looks like a class spear-attack.
Free is not a bad pricepoint for me to check if IE6 is rendering my page at all. For companies that need to check this sort of thing before launching, $250 doesn't sound too bad either. Nice work!
I live and die by the "advanced routing codes" on Matrix... see my previous post here:

SFO,LAX CX,AA,KE F HKG,ICN,NRT ~CZ+ KMG

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3090362
Yes, but their pricing is published and you can easily sign up online.
No, you're not the only one, I feel the same way.
that seems like a fair enough complaint, but what about verizon or tmobile?
I don't see anything wrong with encouraging those with power and money to focus on benefiting those beneath them in the hierarchy, rather than solely themselves. You can dismiss it as "non quantifiable moralizing" while I'll just call it desirable ethics.

Incidentally, what's with the sarcasm?
Hmm, hope you don't take many vacations
Is the idea to get a kind of github style project management that you can host on your own server?
Kaggle - San Francisco, CA
We're looking for:
* Product Manager
* VP Engineering
* Data scientists
* Developers (REMOTE)

More information at http://www.kaggle.com/careers

Kaggle has just closed a large Series A ($11.25m). Our early employees will help shape Kaggle's direction and grow along with the company. Regardless of the position, you should have a strong interest in data science and the intellectual curiosity to engage with competition clients from a wide variety of fields.
Kaggle is aiming to build a meritocratic marketplace that will change the way data science gets done. Read more at: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/kaggles-contests-crunch....
I think the assumption there is that if we do everything right we will always succeed. I am not sure that is the case. I would say that failure (and success) both give one an opportunity to analyse what was done well and what was done poorly.

Sometimes when you take risks, you will lose.
they have to wonder whether the candidate is more motivated by the money or the love

Personally, seeing this makes me want to work for him solely because in addition to seeing him as extremely competent and clever, I now see him as someone who is generous and clearly values those 'under' him. I would take a below-average salary to work in an environment like that, regardless of whether there is ever another big payout.
Not to knock on the author's article, but I've never seen a code encryption technique or assembler-level obfuscation that wasn't trivial to remove. If you're looking for protection technologies that perform well in the real world, look into Source Level obfuscation, Virtual Machines, and Antidebug tricks. If other people are interested I can post links.

Also interesting to see an article like this on the front page of HN...
I can put a "not responsible for stolen items" sign in my restaurant, but if the coat check employee bolts out the door when you hand them your coat, I'm buying you a new one.
Things I Learned About Programming . . . by Programming
How bad is the commute to SF?
Serving gzipped CSS and JavaScript from Amazon CloudFront via S3
And, I'd add "if any of this is news to you, you should _seriously_ question whether you're skilled/competent enough to be admin-ing publicly accessable servers with files (like bitcoin wallets) that can be valued in the thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands or more)".
Show HN: Turn your sinatra app into a static website (less than 75loc)
Wistia Cofounder On How To Sell To Businesses - with Chris Savage
And most of those places suck. You have to wonder, can you design a discussion community framework in a way that enables more constructive discussions on these topics? Maybe something different than a straight threaded (or non-threaded) discussion forum? In the same manner that Stack Overflow tries to do it for programming and more general Q&A; not that I'm saying it'd work the same way as SO.
High conversion Spanish Premature
High conversion Spanish Premature
High Converting Spanish Premature ejaculation product
That guy just totally rocks. I wish I could work with him.
It makes plenty of sense. It's relative to one's financial situation, but for most people a $125,000 bonus is a very different event.
Google presses on (with new privacy policy)
Trading platform Bitcoinica attempts to get Linode to compensate $50,000+
Boutique en ligne Chaussure Adidas JS Panda Jeune Kids
When I lived in the Mission, I regularly saw a pair of cops walking a beat on 24th (with old-school plain wooden batons, no less).

However, this was the exception, rather than the rule.
To be honest, MS did indeed intend to target Win2000 at businesses and WinMe at home users, though Win2000 actually have good DirectX support unlike NT4.
Problems aren't cool. Problems are problems, but solving problems is more than cool, it is also financially rewarding. This seems more like bug fixing without any financial incentive and the reward is finishing the job application.

I don't know if this is clever PR or not. Would the average software developer realize that they are working for free?
Netflix Loses Toy Story 3, Tron and 1,000 More Movies
Yes. Tracing this back to one of their own employees, the company is clearly liable for any resulting loss. If they do not find themselves liable (and a court does not) this will be a big problem for people doing shared or cloud hosting, and traditional, physically secure datacenters will see a resurgence.
No, you use a stolen private key to transfer the Bitcoins to a new public key whose private key is only known to the thief.
<devil's advocate>Yeah, but could the (ex) coat owner hold the restaurant's landlord liable? Isn't it the restaurant _managers_ problem?

I think there's a _lot_ of "grey areas" here, and while I feel sympathy for the guy who's out ~$13k worth of bitcoins, I can't help but think he was "doing the wrong thing" relying on the security of an inexpensive vps to keep them safe…
According to your third link, the household wealth of the bottom 40% grew by 157% between 1989 and 2001, and the middle 20% had their wealth grow by 200%.

The majority of your links focused solely on relative measures, not absolute ones (i.e., the incomes of the poor grew more slowly than the rich).

Want to try again?

Would you consider YOURSELF middle class if you only had access to what a '50's middle class family had? A 1920's one?

Hmm, ok, I'll choose my own arbitrary definition of middle class - it involves flying cars, robots and spaceships. No one meets my definition in the present era. In contrast, 20 years ago, when I defined "middle class" as stone knives and bear skins, everyone in the US was middle class.

Oh no, we are all so poor, something must be done!
This is already possible using projects like erlectricity(https://github.com/mojombo/erlectricity) and its associated subprojects (https://github.com/mojombo/ernie). I think there is a huge potential with mixing ruby and erlang, as strange bedfellows as they are. I'm excited!
You assume the existing system isn't laden with corruption and unrealistic fees. What's likely happened is that Square recognizes it can undercut some other (company|companies) too cozy in their operations and steal their lunch.

Otherwise, adoption and success would fare poorly - Square don't sound like they're desperate or stupid.
Right, and the whole office scenario is even scarier than the "Uncle Pete at the computer shop" scenario. In non-techie offices --say, the doctor's office, dentist, the local real-estate shop, whatever-- people don't have a clue about security. And, they have even less of a clue about Chrome being so dangerous. Imagine everyone going out for lunch and leaving their computers unattended (and unlocked).

Given that scenario, someone up to no good who stays behind with the express purpose of stealing personal data can have a treasure trove of information by the time everyone is back. And --again, this is my biggest point-- they don't have to be a hacker to do this. All they have to do is point and click and they got everyone's data (and the businesses data as well).

It's about time that Google fix this so that it actually requires some skill and effort to steal your data.

This is also one of the reasons none of my notebooks have Chrome. Imagine loosing it or having it stolen.
As others have pointed out - the problem is not locking your machine when you leave it alone. Suppose that you're using whatever browser that you think does this right, and an adversary gets unencumbered access to the machine because you didn't lock it while you were away. How much protection do you think FireFox or whatever is going to provide relative to the keylogger that is now running on the box?

It's not a slam dunk that Chrome would be better if it had a master password anyway given that rarely used passwords tend to be forgotten quickly, and no one wants Chrome to inflict us with some Vista UAC clone.

Finally, it's extremely annoying to read hyperbolic comments in which the author responds to criticism by redirecting to some irrelevant corner case viz "my post refers to a more general use of Chrome". If that were really the case, then why "the sky is falling" tone in the original post?
Bitcoinica just reported losing 10K BTC (worth $50K USD) in this same incident.
- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66961.msg778254#msg77...
I just got off the phone with AT&T customer support. While the representative was sympathetic, she stressed that "AT&T is not required to provide notification of service changes." I informed her that this change constituted a major change in service, and that I viewed it as grounds to waive the ETF and get out of my current contract. This, apparently, is not a view shared by AT&T. I'm debating wether or not to call again and be nasty to see if I can get out of my contract, but I doubt it will do any good.
This is one reason why, at US tax rates, it would be more efficient to split the bonus over 2 or more years. Also, that delayed vesting could help with retention.
Ask HN: Background Check APIs?
Are there any good providers of background check APIs? Specifically for criminal and civil plus perhaps credit checks. Something like Reppify is not what I'm looking for with all the social integration and high price. I'm looking for a simple API to perform high volumes of fairly simple identity verification and background checks.