skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> PBKDF2 is worse than bcrypt.

You seem to be speaking only to its compute time -- what do you say to the article's claim that bcrypt has a higher probability of having an unexpected attack that mitigates its computational complexity?

Also, since all of these algorithms have adjustable work factors, what does it even mean to say that one is stronger than another? Couldn't you just calibrate the work factors so that they are equivalently strong? Though naturally scrypt has strength in another dimension also (memory).
Not to mention the "dollars dollars" redundancy that made my left eye twitch.
I don't understand why fun projects can't just be fun projects...why does everything have to be interpreted as some sort of statement concerning the state of the web?
Oops! Good spot. Thanks.
I strongly agree that when asked by friends what to use, you should think about which library is going to be easier for them to use, and not try to think through which construction is "better". That this blog post gets the real ordering of betterness wrong is tangential to the real problem, which is that it gets the value proposition of bcrypt wrong.
Wow, you jumped right on that :) I deleted the comment immediately after posting it because I wasn't really sure I could support that statement. As someone who doesn't know a lot about security algorims, I'm susceptible to the idea posed in the article that the better-proven algorithm is a safer bet; but on second thought, it seemed a little paranoid, since I haven't seen any positive reason to doubt bcrypt's security. And given that PBKDF2 is an uglier thing to try to recommend, and "just use something" is the most important message, I think the current atmosphere around bcrypt is probably fine.
Love it. I'm sure lots of people will like it too. Very polished. I like it that you provide dummy images so impatient people like me don't have to upload an image to test it out.
Chinese writers' lawsuit against Apple over pirated ebooks gains momentum
> [basing haskell on opaque ideas like currying is dumb] (paraphrase)

Simon Peyton-Jones (haskell creator) often says in videos that haskell is a sandbox for playing with CS ideas that haven't yet mainstreamed. Monads are a great example - haskell's purity helped distill the idea into something less opaque and now these ideas are starting to pop up in mainstream languages - "jquery is a monad"[1].

its not haskell that is dumb, dumb is when people try to use haskell for things it wasn't designed for. Scala and Clojure are both chock full of functional opinions yet designed to be practical.

[1] http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/jquery-is-a-m...
Sure, so? That doesn't mean that I'm conflating the two terms.
im a bad PM, hence the reason why i need to talk to someone, im not hiring for a position, just trying to have a chat with someone who can share their thoughts
What the hell is wrong with real time capabilities (I won't comment on open source DRM, except to say it would make an okay April first joke)? The web needs them, if it is to become the future we always wanted.
All it takes is a pencil and some scotch tape, it does not get much more low tech than that.
Your last paragraph about Zidane is interesting. Keeping possession is a bigger tactical advantage than many people previously thought. Imagine an entire team playing keep-away for the win, patiently building up to goals confident they will get them, and you essentially have Barcelona: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6A_K8oWqfk

Zidane was more of an attacking midfielder, which makes his contributions all the more obvious, but even Zidane himself knew that the core of a great team was as far back as the often unheralded position of defensive midfield. When his club Real Madrid sold Claude Makelele and bought David Beckham, Zidane remarked, "Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley when you are losing the entire engine?"

Despite the presence of more heralded players like Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi, Busquets is likewise the tactical centerpiece of Barcelona, almost purely due to his intelligence on the pitch. In defense, he drops back and positions himself to intercept passes rather than challenging for the ball, and once he has it he almost always makes the right decision where to put it next. And when Barcelona have possession, he pushes forward to form a triangle with the rest of the midfield, providing an open outlet to maintain possession and recycle it. If you chart out the passes Barcelona make in a typical match, there's usually a very heavy triangle between Xavi, Iniesta, and Busquets.

The most interesting part of Barcelona's tactic, though, is the way they seem to push even more players into the midfield. Their notional striker is Messi, but in his "false nine" role he plays closer to attacking midfield. Likewise, Barcelona's defenders push forward and hold a very high line. Defensive midfielders like Mascherano and even Busquets have been repurposed to play as central defenders, while Pique can make effective runs forward. Right-back Dani Alves usually rushes forward to play as a winger.

The interesting thing about Barcelona's style of play is that, while it's obviously a tactic well suited for a team full of good passers who have played with each other mostly since childhood, it can be surprisingly effective for other teams. Swansea have used it very effectively in the Premier League this season, while Borussia Mönchengladbach have gone from near-relegation to the Champions League places: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAx9kYx8qo4
It's nonsensical. It essentially argues that SHA2 is less likely to have cryptographic results relevant to hashing in the next 5 years than Blowfish. It's also an argument the post doesn't support with any actual evidence.

But that's not my issue with the article. My issue with the article is that it takes a simple security issue with no "real" wrong answers and turns it into a tribal conflict, which has the net effect of reducing the number of people who will use adaptive hashing at all.

I'm familiar with Tony Arcieri's work and generally think highly of him; this article, though, is inexplicable and smacks of hipsterism. "I liked Nirvana but then they got popular and sold out, so now I listen to Sleater Kinney". Well, that's going to sound dumb in 10 years.

Let me say yet again that if you use PBKDF2, bcrypt, or scrypt, you are going to look smarter than the average webdev, no matter which one you pick. Do whichever is easiest.
In fact I don't, which was why I said "critical path in C, rest in Go". Usually I do Java but if I need to use C, I'd like to just write the part that needs to be fast, then drive it using something else. Python is also acceptable when it comes to parsing command line options and the like, and it's as slow as dogshit.

"Lots of free time" would be dicking around with cryptic STL error messages.
The Tragedy of the Commons refers to the overuse of a shared commodity that takes time to renew. I do not see how this applies to newspapers.
So much for Lisp as the ultra-expressive, compact language, I guess... Impressive speeds, though.
Can we stay back from these type of fucking hacks?
www.appleholder.com
My monologue was a fabrication, but they edited me!
Agreed. Another consideration is that many newspapers suffer from an outdated ownership structure. I'm not sure about Gannet, but I know some of the others, like Tribune before 2007 and NYT had a problem. They were started by famous businessmen or families that then created a structure to keep the holdings within the family. The problem with this is that their descendants owned the trusts that run the company and were unwilling to forgo the dividends that came their way. People outside the publishing industry are often amazed at how much money these companies gave away to shareholders as dividends and for how long, despite it being clear to everyone else in the world that they should have been keeping the money in the bank.
Electron Volts are a unit of energy. It's basically the amount of energy that is released from a single electron travelling through an electric potential difference of one volt. Ten billion electron Volts is a lot of energy for a single particle but it is still one billionth of a single Joule.
There are other uses of the slash character. It's a poor choice.

_ or | get my vote, but it's a bit late now to fix the mistakes of the past. There are enough special chars needed anyway that collisions are inevitable.

At least they didn't pick 'E'.
> I write this post because I've noticed a sort of "JUST USE BCRYPT" cargo cult... This is absolutely the wrong attitude to have about cryptography.

No. This is incorrect. This is exactly the right attitude for most developers to have about cryptography, because on a subject as complex as cryptography most developers (including me!) are nowhere near smart enough to understand the ins and outs.

Encouraging people to make their own decisions on subjects they aren't equipped to understand fully is dangerous advice. It leads to all sorts of bad outcomes. People who have to choose between options they don't really understand end up choosing things at random, or on the basis of incomplete or misleading information, or getting seized up by the need to make a choice and choosing nothing at all.

This makes cryptography one of the very few cases where a cargo-cult approach is better than the alternatives. A simple message that "this is the approach people smarter than you agree is correct, use it," repeated consistently, will help more people more completely than dumping them into the deep end of the crypto pool ever will.
This is well stated, but it's the same old "the end justifies the means" reasoning that's long been a comfort to many liars, cheats and thieves.

Yes, Chinese labor sucks compared to a fat American lifestyle, but hyperbole and outright fabrication has now trivialized that issue. A good reporter does not insert themselves into the story if they're serious about the subject matter.
Defensive Programming: Being Just-Enough Paranoid
Use Launchy 2.5 and Forget Your Windows Start Menu
I should probably do a better job of highlighting that. If you click on one of the textures at the bottom, you can start one without uploading. Here's a direct link to the wood texture for example: http://www.pinwords.com/start/032fb4c570bf11e18ae1e7074e371e...
Bangalore. no car.

But I have to admit that I always feel like getting one because all the tech events happen on the other side of the city and I spend a lot of time travelling to these events.
My background is in garbage-collected languages, including .NET and PHP. Because of my lack of background in manual memory management, I've always been nervous to try to learn C, even when it may be a better approach.

Go sounds like a great language for someone with my background to be able to work with a closer to the metal language but by handling some of the more difficult aspects of working with C like memory management and pointer arithmetic.
Indeed.. as well as KeePass for Blackberry.
I actually aliased git push to push to the current branch.
I think that the risk of poor management is something that will be dealt with at any company where your employees are all young; startups have a younger employee base - and you get a lot of people re-inventing the wheel.

There is a lot to be said for the companies, especially in silicon valley, that are large, established and older - they will have a range of good managers.

If you're only out looking for rock-stars, ninjas or other witty adjectives your employee base maybe younger and lacking experience in some of the more esoteric aspects of running a company.

When I was interviewing at Twitter they mentioned they had ton of internal chaos where a lot of the young employees, having had maybe only one prior company as an experience point only had that company's culture for reference - and this was a problem for them.
Top 5 Benefits of Finance Software for Small Businesses
Yeah, I'm already thinking about "etching" graphene circuits with my old dvd burners. Is it really as easy as they make it sound?
Introduction to Domain Theory
>> good idea, but I think this is an industry where you don't
>> win with technology...but with connections in the
>> industry...

Exactly. CRE is slightly a different kind of animal.
Apple has only become this profitable by abandoning their early days' Not Invented Here syndrome, when they used to design and build their products from soup to nuts, and instead riding the wave of innovation by specialized third party suppliers with off-the-shelf solutions. They have long discovered that it's much less risky and much more profitable to let others do the fundamental component development work, and focus on integration of third party solutions, with occasional guidance towards meeting their goals. Even for a company the size of Apple, it can be difficult to predict where the industry will go, and a few mistakes can leave you dependent on some expensive proprietary technology dead-end while the rest of the industry passes you by with lower prices and superior functionality. It's much cheaper and just as effective against competitors to tie up the world's supply of DRAM than to build a foundry and make all those chips yourself.
Drugs. C.f., Brave New World.
Here's my thoughts:

1. Ability to modify default settings
It is sometimes nice to set the global defaults.

2. Ability to expose methods.
A nice way of calling the someFunc() would be nice. I guess you can do it like this: $(...).data('_wTooltip').someFunc(); but using the data() seems a bit hacky.

3. Use settings from html5 data-attribute, ie data-tooltip='{"foo":"baar"}'. Not really necessary for the example plugin, but I think it could be for others. I hate it when I need initialize every instance separately just to specify it's options, when they could be specified in the markup.

4. Missing var before $settings. Just a typo I guess?

5. I think the name generate() is a bit misleading, init() or initialize() makes more sense to me.
Okay. Suppose I am a secretary, but my job has now been automated out of existence by Microsoft Excel. I have a $300 computer to browse Hacker News with, but no job. How did I benefit?

Unless I have steadier access to food, shelter, healthcare, and a safe society, I don't think it should count as a productivity gain or increase in standard of living.
What can you tell us about the actual peer review process that you think was involved with PBKDF2?

(Me just saying it won't be nearly as impactful, because apparently I'm in the tank for bcrypt).

Don't know? This will make a worthwhile 30 minute Googling project. That's what I do when I get in over my head, and I promise, learning about adaptive hashing is going to be more useful than reading court decisions about what does or doesn't constitute a breach of the duty of loyalty for a company director (to cite my last Google dive from HN).
In Defense Of KONY 2012
I'm a bit concerned about at least one measurement:

Read 16-byte file
100000 iterations
2.1s for 100k reads
21219.3ns per read

This appears to be testing... the filesystem cache? It's certainly not seeking on a rotational disk, "SSD" isn't on the page, so... not sure where he's getting 21 microsecond reads from.
But the guy who actively campaigned for the WA state income tax was his dad. I'm not surprised they agree on it though; it would be awkward to publicly disagree with your own family about this kind of thing, especially if you're a billionaire.
But you only have to have 50.1% of the shares to force the other 49.9% to let you go private :-)
I do this as well, but mainly because the default behavior of 'git push' makes me jittery. I might be more comfortable if this change is made. +1
The comments section of the main article (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/treder20120318) mentions people trying to do that.
Underrepresentation != racism/sexism/any other -ism

The overwhelming majority of carpenters are male. Does this make carpenters' unions sexist? Of course not.

I'd hire a talented developer even if they had green or purple skin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract "In geometry, the tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron or cubic prism, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of 6 square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of 8 cubical cells."

Looks like the perfect name to me. Sounds like the "other" project already has an established name of "tesseract ocr", don't see any reason why this library would be confused with that. Lame for people to focus on this instead of the crazy beautiful api that comes with this thing:

https://github.com/square/tesseract/wiki/API-Reference
I'm not sure that land fits the bill.

Land can be created, especially if you define land as physical space suitable for human habitation and productivity: technological improvements that render formerly uninhabitable terrain useful can be construed as 'creating' land. Seasteading and space colonization will eventually begin 'creating' land in this fashion.

Technological improvements that allow progressively smaller amounts of physical space to maintain a constant amount of productivity also have a similar effect.

Even in the most literal sense, physical terrain can be created; the Dutch are pretty good at turning sea into land, and in the very distant future, we may be able even to construct entire planets out of dust and debris.

Maybe the supply of matter and energy with which to do these things is a zero-sum game, but not likely one we'll have to worry about any time soon.
I disagree with your assessment of dividends vs. share buybacks. My opinion mirrors that of Mark Cuban. A few choice quotes from [1]:

Dividends offer _true_ returns:

They send a message to shareholders that you want them to stay as shareholders and are rewarding them for their committment to your company. Its a reminder to shareholders that the business investments you have made have actually worked and the reward is that cash can be returned to shareholders . That profits are more important to shareholders over the long term than trying to convince wall street to increase your PE [via buybacks].

Meanwhile... buybacks just perpetuate insider dilution:

Companies continuously issue new shares to their managers without asking their existing shareholders. Those managers then leak that stock to the market a little at a time. It’s unlimited dilution of existing shareholders’ stakes, death by a thousand dilutive cuts. If that isn’t a scam, I don’t know what is. Individual shareholders have nothing but the chance to sell it to the next sucker. A mutual fund buys one million shares of a company with your and your coworkers’ money. You own 1 percent of the company. Six weeks later you own less, and all that money went to insiders, not to the company. And no one asked your permission, and you didn’t know you got diluted or by how much till 90 days after the fact if that soon.

[1] http://blogmaverick.com/2006/07/22/executive-pay-and-stock-p...
been using it for a while. has a few annoying quirks, but overall i love it.
But what about a hybrid system where you could add an hour or two of usage in that first few seconds of charging?

Would be great during a layover in a typical US airport where you might have to sit on the floor in a corner to use a power outlet. You could plug in for 10s to fill the cap, eat lunch while the cap charges the battery for an hour, plug in again for 10s before you fly out having something close to a full battery.
A simple server for static files and blog posts: https://bitbucket.org/floren/goblog

It uses only the packages which ship with Go, with the exception of a Markdown parser. Unfortunately, it's written for an ~6 month old release of Go on Plan 9, but you can get the general idea of building Go web stuff. The code's a bit ugly too, but it does work.
GCC has resisted modularity for a while because of concerns about enabling proprietary plugins; an unfortunate case of letting ideology come before technical excellence. This left a big unmet need and put LLVM in a stronger position to displace GCC purely on technical merit, by offering this capability that GCC didn't want to offer.

http://lwn.net/Articles/301135/
Hi, the idea with "5 minutes" is to find the first thing that wasn't as you might have thought it was. Then, you keep finding more, and more.

Ultimately we will find things we like, or are willing to suffer and cover up (true in every community).

It's just how open minded we really are.
That is interesting, I have had the exact opposite experience!

I have never seen a PC keyboard with the backslash anywhere other than in the bottom LEFT corner next to your left smallest/pinky finger with one exception: in Germany and France, they keyboards sometimes have backslash on the top line numerical keys.
This ban has to be taken back, or all other means to browse reddit must be banned as well, including all google browsers, etc.

I don't understand your reasoning here. When a store decides to not devote shelf space to an item, they are in no way trying to prevent you from going to another store that carries it. My local grocer does not carry tomatillos, but they're not going to sue me if I get them elsewhere.
Awesome. loved it!
Best of Clojure/West 2012
That's good to know. I was having this issue myself when having a remote branch with a different name than the local branch. git push was ignoring my tracking configuration which I found bizarre. I learned later that you can specify a separate configuration for git push.

This proposed default change in git will make things much clearer, in my opinion and I hope they agree to making the change.
"There is nothing in this controversy that contests the facts in my work about the nature of Chinese manufacturing."

Nice bit of misdirection there.
6. Prevention of double instantiation.
Actually, finding companies whose market cap is less than asset value is a great way of insuring you're buying shares at a discount. This is pretty rare in technology companies, which are generally valued far above assets, but it's possible to find this sort of thing in more predictable sectors.

For more information, you could look at Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor". This is a very good introduction to investment, but it's also quite a long read.
So Nice We Did it Twice: Humble Bundle for Android #2 Arrives
I assume notifyneal is a brand new user, not located in SV??? You sound a little uniformed and here's why:

The beautiful thing about the internet world is that you're not judged on your face/race/religion. You're judged according to what you can produce???

A better more reliable approach to the "data" your gathering would be to find out what percentage of Software engineering students are black/white/asian/hispanic and find out if there is a substantial deviation represented in the larger community.
This Amazing Device Just Made Wheelchairs Obsolete
Words are dying right now. Are you helping to kill them?
It's iOS only because Android does NOT support accelerometer within the browser.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA IT BURNS IT BURNS
Posted mostly because I think Nirvana is dead on. There are lots of bootstrapped founders on HN and no reason for this community to perceive ridiculously onerous terms as social norms. The more people speak up against them, the more fair treatment all founders will get and the more pressure investors will face to get involved at an earlier stage.

Fully agree selective cash-outs can be ethically problematic if there are other stakeholders without the same option. That said, it's probably safe to assume the transfer is happening via a private equity sale rather than having the company issue new stock. And given the evidence this is a first round by a bootstrapped team it seems unlikely there are any outside equity holders. Maybe California is different, but the bootstrapped teams I've known don't tend to give out equity, in part because they only tend to hire when they can afford it, and in part because dealing with legal issues is a luxury before there are revenues.