skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well said. PHP gets a lot of crap thrown at it, but in the end, one of the biggest companies and second biggest website on the internet uses it as it's primary language.. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for any of us to use.
great question. we'd like to. have any ideas for the most inexpensive service? we don't have a business model (and don't plan to serve ads)...we just want to see what happens.
That's probably the wrong way to think about it, and might -- as it does in this case -- lead to a ridiculously oversized password-guessing implementation which tries to do too much fancy business.

The most obvious way to do password strength checking would not (I don't think) let you "use this list to begin cracking", but would instead estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the password, as a proxy for its entropy.

That sounds daunting, but it's actually pretty simple in principle: append the password to a couple concatenated dictionaries plus popular password files, and see how much it compresses with your favorite zipping algorithm. Compare it to how much 'password1' zips, because you know that's the first one that they try and therefore it has complexity 2^0. If the zipping algorithm is good, it will automatically figure out most of these tricks directly from the 'bad password lists'.

I would say a little more: it is probably the case that you can "steal" the dictionary from one zipping and force a zipping algorithm to use that dictionary. If this is the case, the dictionary needed reduces to 64 KiB (I believe) rather than the 600 KB that the above script requires. I don't know how much effort it takes to get zlib-with-a-static-preset running in JS but then again, I don't know how much time it took zxcvbn to reach its final form either.

Using /usr/share/dict/american-english for my dictionary is a bit crap because it does not yet speak l33t, but my dictionary can be used for "correcthorsebatterystaple". XKCD estimates 44 bits = 5.5 bytes; gzip --best estimates 7 bytes, maybe more if we had more sequences ending in '1' to better compress 'password1'. (Some extra bits are to be expected purely due to the diverse number of password-guessing algorithms; 'switch one character to l33t, switch two characters to l33t, end with a number' offer a couple extra bits which XKCD ignores in order to establish a lower bound.)
How Fortune 500 companies profit from Facebook scammers
I’m 25, with an Oxford degree. Why I'm learning to code.
Hillary Clinton Tumblr response (is this how soc media & politics colide now?)
I submitted this a few days ago, but he could use a very simple Object Pool to handle this. Set up a pool with 3 or so Ajax request objects and make requests to that pool.

Here is an example where I setup four MooTools Fx.Morph objects. Then I set up 400 divs that whose width will be modified using the next available Fx.Morph object in the queue. It is pretty simple, powerful stuff. Your objects must be reusable though so I dont think jQuery's built-in ajax/animations would work (I use this in "production" with MooTools' Request objects)

http://jsfiddle.net/XkTPJ/11/

you simply get an instance of Pool, add your actions, by calling pool.act(fn). In your callback you'll receive one of the objects in the pool when it is ready. You use it, and when youre done, put it by by calling this.add(obj)

pool = new Pool();
pool.add(new ObjectInstance());
pool.act(function(obj){
//use obj and put it back
this.add(obj);
});
Maybe I'm missing something in your comment here, but - Python and Ruby already have smooth dev server installs. In fact, much smoother than PHP, as you don't need apache or fancy permissions to just run something local.

Ruby, rails: "rails server"
Ruby, sinatra: "ruby <sinatra script>"
Python, django: "python manage.py runserver"

All of these spin up an app server on some port > 1024. I'm honestly not sure how it can get much easier than that.
Information in Ars' Forum about the event. Initial theory is that one of their ad-networks got hacked.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1171612

Edit: In the short term they've disabled ads across the entire site in an effort to keep the injection channel blocked.
I am also surprised about the complaints. I use Skype for calls multiple times each week using both voice and video and very seldom have any quality issues. Every now and then I have glitches, but for the most part the quality is great.

And yes, I agree with you about the 5.x OS X client (and have written multiple articles about the deficiencies it has).

If people need something to criticize, I'd much rather criticize Skype's lack of IPv6 support, which is going to be problematic as more networks (including my own) look at moving to using more IPv6.
That's probably the reason. Several browsers use Google's lists, I think.
The wide adoption of PHP has nothing to do with it's actual quality, though.
I'm with you Anthony.

I work all day with PHP even though I love Ruby (and Rails, and Sinatra...) because practically ALL our client base wants either a static site or Wordpress, or another PHP-based CMS. Few of our clients have the budget for a custom web app with its own custom web stack to power it.

There's almost nothing faster to get bootstrapped into a functional application or script than PHP. Assuming your server is already configured with PHP you just upload the project.

PHP 5.3 and 5.4 give me great hope for the future of the language.
How to prep for: blown bulbs, laptops left in taxis, projectors that get indigestion over your digital input, and viruses that spasmodically stream porn video. Can we use the term "ejaculate' instead of "stream?" It's kind of the same thing, right?
My intention was the full process from creating the first file, to getting a server to serve the content is far easier to do in PHP than Python (granted, in Python it's pretty much boilerplate, but there's a lot more than needs to happen).

As far as the benefit of first-class vs libraries for handling the request, that's something to consider (as there are arguments on both sides)...
The screen grab in the blog post only shows the top 9.
Map of the Dead - Zombie Survival Map
I'd love to see a set of data that compares weak passwords with used-Mailinator. I only ever use weak ones with Mailinator accounts, and I doubt I'm the only one (though maybe not enough to account for a majority of weak-password users).
You don't need more than four desktop applications
Yeah, this is indeed exceptional. How can that really happen?
Bingo! This needed to be said - I've felt the exact same way for some time now. The poster history and being "in the Apple camp" are a dead give away.
We did an interview with the Listserve guys at Betabeat: http://www.betabeat.com/2012/04/10/the-listserve-nyu-itp-pro...

Seems like a super cool project.
And your point is?

Drug kingpins spend considerable effort building their operations, often at considerable risk to their own safety.

Does that risk and hard work mean that we should simply accept their corrupt activity and influence?

Corruption is corruption.
Giving back: They’ll form your company for free inc filing fees. Theres no catch
It's not all over SSH. It uses SSH to authenticate and start a server daemon, which it then connects to over UDP. The UDP connection is not tunneled through the SSH connection.
As I mentioned in a comment earlier this week: to many people, Facebook is the default communication medium for a large number of people. You can bet your ass it would matter! There are many sources of news that people can reach to. But people tend to stick to only a handful of communication mediums. Could you imagine if 'email' shut down tomorrow?
That was pretty thoroughly discussed in the original thread. Yes, PHP throws everything you can do into functions in global scope. It's "convenient" but it's messy. It's also, correct me, but an incredibly trivial distinction.
Lets say for someone who is new to PHP, how long does it normally takes to learn where the minefields are? Is there anyway to start on this? I know in JS there is Javascript The Good Part. Is there anything equivalent in PHP?
Let's start off by seeing how long the name lasts:

http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/legal.asp

http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/trademark.asp

http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Mailman+is+not+Listserv

This is why people call them 'mailing lists'.
Don't, it's outdated and the official docs are just fine.
Lost the Passion for Software Development?
Canada proposes a bitcoin clone
That's a neat list. Thug, Punch, Loot, Jodhpurs, Dinghy, Cummerbund, Cot, Bungalow, ...
Thanks for sharing the insight.
It's cheap, it's already working in my project, it has a nice test stub, automatic reconnections, flash fallback for older browsers, support is responsive and effective, even when it's my fault.

The many toy pusher clones need to worry about the 90% of a project that is the polish before pusher will go away.
I like this - and just because you start small doesn't mean you can't think big in the long term. Small but steady growth goes a long way towards building a lasting business too.
If you read that part, it certainly didn't inform what you wrote. You tapped out the same tired boilerplate argument as ever without actually saying why he was wrong to dismiss those arguments up front, or without even acknowledging that he did so. So your post was indistinguishable from what someone would say who hadn't read the article, and that's why I called you a jerkhole: I'm pointing out how you didn't add any signal to the conversation. If you'd been serious about adding signal instead of noise, you would have acknowledged that he anticipated your argument, and made a counterargument to his dismissal. You did not. You just said "no it's not, because I say so."
No IcedCoffeescript's await and defer integration yet? Will we ever see them in Coffeescript's core?
Seems like one of the people behind this, joshbegley, is hellbanned on HN. His comments on this page so far are just showing up dead.

Any ideas as to why this is? It makes me wonder about entering my email address on his site.

Edit: If you don't have showdead on, he says that plus signs are now accepted in email addresses[0], and that they won't be serving ads, and are looking for an inexpensive way to send mail[1].

[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824420

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824434
I would still have to say that PHP, by all its flaws, gets the job done. And in the end of the day thats what count to me. That might be a bad view to have but I've been sticking with it for a lot of years now even though Ive flirted with a lot of other languages. Its still the girl i get home to every night
Assuming people can "win" more than once and no one else signs up, the expected wait would be 1 million days.

Edit: Guess I need to explain the math since I've been downvoted.

Let X be the random variable representing the number of draws until you are the winner. The probability that X = k is (999999/1000000)^(k-1) * (1/1000000)

From the definition of expected value:
E = Sum(n*P(X=n), n, 1, Infinity)

From here it's a simple matter of arithmetic to calculate E. Here's the Wolfram Alpha link since I don't feel like typing up math in this input box (shortened so as not to overflow the layout): http://bit.ly/HzRUUt
Why is Instagram worth $1B to Facebook?
how many messages are you sending, to how many clients? likewise, how are you running a public node server for free? how many of these servers are you running? what if... etc, etc.

not dismissing your library, but sounds like a case of "i don't know what i don't know". pusher exists as a service for a reason. there's a bit more to it than pushing json around.
Ah, good point, I suppose an organization could just run this internally.
Around 20% of the web still tells me my dan@dangrossman.info e-mail address is invalid.

.info domains have been around for 11 years now, and I can't work around these sites by removing a character.
Books: Bits vs. Atoms
Never thought of the various social apps like that before .. there really need not be One Social Network To Rule Them All !
What is a Linux distribution?
Netflix and APIs
I used to be a trader, too.

What is interesting to me is that the ethics I encountered in finance (n.b. I was in statistical arbitrage, and I'm pretty sure I'd have a different perspective if I'd worked on mortgage-backed securities) were a lot better than what I've seen in these VC-funded (or VC-hungry) startups. We tend to have this reflexive attitude in technology that people in finance are scummy, when the reality is that they're just more honest about their greed than VC-istan types.

The engineers in these companies are great. Really ambitious, really talented, and often fully believing in whatever marketing-copy "vision" the VC darling comes up with so people will be glad to work for 0.01%, vested over four years, of a company that will probably be flipped for 100-500M. I've never disliked the engineers anywhere. At least 85% of the VPs and above are fucking slime, though.

I think the "little startups" point you make has sense, but I think the ideal is a small, stable startup that also has a chance of becoming larger. I think the objective should be to build a stable and small business doing work of very high quality, and later growing-- a "get rich slowly" strategy of solving interesting and hard problems on the small scale first and eventually developing the tools and expertise to solve major ones. Maybe I'm naive, but this is what I'd like to see in my next company. A "change the world in 20 years" approach, rather than an all-out effort to bank it in 48 months that (a) leaves everyone burned out from working too hard, and (b) almost always involves ethical compromise.

What's behind the VC/build-to-flip mentality is competitive paranoia and the attempt to exploit social trends to get a first-entrant effect. Many of these social networks are winner-take-all, sure. But there are a lot of creative and technological ventures that don't have to be like that. If you're a game studio, for example, of course there is competition... but if you make a great game and another studio does so in the same year, the result is that you both win and it's a great year for games. I wish people focused more on that, and less on "destroying" other companies. Every time I interact with a company that says their business model is to "destroy <tech company X>" I always find them to be really unethical.
Yes, he explicitly says that common phrases (like "this is easy to guess" and "harry potter") are a type of pattern he would like to include in the system but didn't for technical reasons.
I think you are getting confused between damn federal goverment money-wasting pork barrel projects in other states and vital local jobs brought to that state by it's brilliant and astute senator.

Sometimes it's very difficult for mere amateurs to spot the difference.
It seems crazy but it isn't really. What if NYT has a lot of debts? It could be worth negative amounts, since the new owner could be responsible for those debts.

There are plenty of ways for a large company (especially an older company) to have a neutral or negative market cap, since that is based on its profit potential, not on how much economic activity it creates.
Kubuntu breaks up with Canonical, Blue Systems is the new sponsor
I don't like the "tools" analogy that always comes up. For example, Robertson screws are better than Phillips head screws, which in turn are better than flatheads. All of them are tools, and they all effectively do the same thing. But the Robertson screw is better.
Thank you for this answer. I apparently missed this important distinction on my first pass through.
Magic Safari
While adoption isn't on facebook's level, twitter is in pretty damned wide adoption at this point. Hence you see so many people in the media pimp their/their company's twitter now (ESPN last time I actively watched it was super bad about this for example).
Hm, not that I know of. The biggest thing is to read about PHP's security issues (especially how to avoid SQL injection attacks). After that, it's mostly writing code in it. If you start by writing PHP like you'd write C and then branch out, you can figure it out. Stay away from running anything shell related from your PHP code or anything that manipulates the file system unless you know what you're doing. If you're doing anything that's very critical to your users, I'd probably do it in a different language.
That is what pair programming is about. Collaborative changes in real-time.
In the study, people were asked if they remembered having such an X-ray any time during their life. And people who had a brain tumor were more likely to answer yes.

I wouldn't be surprised if that just means that people are likely to forget about such exams, unless they get a brain tumor and start fretting about what might have caused it. Maybe they'll even start "remembering" radiation exposure in their youth that never actually happened. The study itself may produce such false memories by suggestive questioning.

I'll take note if the link can be shown with real data rather than questionnaires. Until then, I'm sceptical.
The Quartz Tutorial - Creating a Graph With Quartz 2D
Yeah this doesn't work at all if you live outside USA. The post code for Auckland CBD (in New Zealand) is 1010.

So if I try http://zip.elevenbasetwo.com/?zip=1010

It gives: {"country": "US", "state": "MA", "city": "BRIMFIELD"}
Bill Davidow - How Computers Are Creating a Second Economy Without Workers
Pusher costs ~$49/month, my time is worth $1000/hour [1]

It took me about 5 minutes to setup Pusher and for that I get private channels, presence, someone to handle the scaling etc... as djb_hackernews already mentioned.

We outsource DNS, email, hosting infrastructure, anything I possibly can which isn't core to the product itself.

The question shouldn't be why outsource this, the question is why would it be worth our time writing and supporting it ourselves when we can be working on other things?

Maybe we'll insource this stuff when we're at a point where we hit the 'enterprise' plan on Pusher, when we have a few more developers and a dedicated sys-admin. I'll cross that bride then, in the meantime I'm happy to have a $49/m hit on my credit card and move onto the next thing!

All that aside, it's great to have options so thanks for releasing this!

[1] - http://blog.asmartbear.com/value-time.html
Creating Images From Words
Discovering a Major Security Hole in Facebook's Android SDK
And yet I have 5-6 different sized Phillips and standard screw drivers. I've never even heard of Robertson screws.
> how old are you?

Regardless of your stated intent, you should be aware that your query comes across as a subtle form of ad-hominum. Let's discuss "all that is fit to print" and not my white chest hair ..
On the whole, I agree with you. However -

1) Unless you're Instagram - a big startup will cost you much more than 2 years of life. The monetary price probably doesn't matter much as you will have acquired funding.

2) I also think the expected value of any given random point on the "startup dartboard" is smaller than the values you threw out there.

That all said...my interests align with yours. Hitting singles is more attractive than swinging for the fences. Goals change though...Rocket Lease may be a safe bet on your part. If traction picks up and it becomes an undeniable juggernaut...I don't think you or anybody else wouldn't take the "big startup" ride.
"If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for any of us to use."

This doesn't follow at all.
I think startups are too plastic to be characterized this way. Well, software startups anyway—hardware, durable goods, science, or other capital intensive startups are a different story.

I suppose there are small markets to go after and big markets, but there are also unknown markets, and to go truly huge and be the VC darling of the decade you might need to create your own market. But the kicker is that the market you are targeting is not fixed. Software is sufficiently abstract, and it's reasonable to run lean enough that you can literally change your target market overnight. And in the case of the really huge startups, they all get there through a series of pivots to scale progressively. None of them start with the vision of what they ultimately become. The people who think Facebook/Google/Apple scale at the beginning are probably more dreamers than doers. The trick is to grow your ambitions as you grow your business. So I don't disagree with the advice, other than to caution against letting your bootstrapping thought process color your future ambition.
It helps though. High adoption, especially with bigger companies, leads to my eyes on the code which can cause a higher quality run time. It also means there are more tools, frameworks, reference books, and ultimately jobs out there for it.
You're right, we're looking at moving this elsewhere in the future. Thanks for the heads up.
* Who cares if the USPS already has it? The app developer is the one seeking it.

* And USPS does not give the DB away for free.

* Your attitude sucks. And your 5 minutes of searching were not enough.
I've found that the people I know (even excellent programmers) who love PHP tend to hate Ruby and find it extremely confusing.

Maybe there is just a fundamental brain-structure difference between individuals... I don't actually think PHP is easier for a beginner than something like Sinatra, so I don't buy the explanation that PHP is easier for those new to programming.
Yet the article said: "The filing is intriguing for a number of reasons, not least of which is the strong opposition by the Texas congressional delegation to NASA's Commercial Crew program. SpaceX is one of four NASA partners in Commercial Crew, the object of which is to develop private sector access to the International Space Station. Texas seems to dominate the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, with five members, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson has been one of Commercial Crew's strongest critics. "

This makes it seem like Texas doesn't want a non-government alternative to NASA.

Or perhaps they're just playing hard to get.
Combinatorics. Yes.
Major telco carriers to launch database to prevent reuse of stolen phones
I guess your next step should be to profile the apache reqs?

Unless you know that you're doing CPU-heavy work in your apache procs (and it's unavoidable or already optimised), it seems that you could get back the responsiveness of your site?

It seems surprising that you're CPU-limited on the web head.
They already blame the bank and the internet when they have to change their password after every login because you've forced them to set it to something completely non memorable.
Massive Mac Trojan Attack Still Under Way
There is a quote from Bjarne Stroustrup saying along the same line...

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”
― Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition
It's also dependent on what orbit you want.

Equatorial is easiest launch to achieve and you gain the biggest advantage from launching east and near the equator so it's what was tried first. It's also rather useful if you wish to go to the moon - which is one of the reasons KSC is where it is.

Today fibre cables means geostationary is a declining satellite market and a lot of the new business needs to go into much higher inclination orbits to cover a larger part of the earth's surface (think Iridium, GPS etc). For this an equatorial launch still helps but latitude is less of a consideration than the angle you can launch from without hitting any major cities.

This is the reason for Edwards AFB, if you want a polar (eg orbit for surveillance satellites) you really don't want to launch due N from KSC - there is a lot of expensive real estate on the eastern seaboard!