skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Entropy of [a-z0-9] per character : 5,1 bits
Entropy of [A-Za-z0-9] per character : 5,95 bits
Entropy lost by case insensitivity
(per character): 0,85 bits (15%)

Bottom line: add 2 characters, and your password stays strong. Still, it would cool to warn users, or at least explicitly advise them to use longer passwords.
My first C program: simple process supervisor like daemontools/runit  in 359 LoC
This isn't a bug at all. I would question the assumption that case sensitivity increases the actual search space significantly, theoretically it does but in practise most users will:

- Uppercase first letter only

- All lowercase

It's a usability decision from Blizzard, not a bug.
As a person who isn't super smart I needed an IDE and I got jetbrains webstorm which is one of the products mentioned under the link posted by lapusta. I am not a shill for jetbrains products but I swear by them all the same.
You're missing the point. The versioning isn't to help me determine the meaning.

The point of the versioning is so that I can see which representative made which change, and from there derive which ones actually have my best interest in mind.
Details of the underlying computer architecture (say, x86) and the implementation of the emulator (say, C/C++) inevitably leak into the abstractions nominally above that level.

One trivial example: let's say that I want to emulate a machine with 100,000 CPUs. On a quad-core PC. There is a strong pressure to reduce the number of emulated CPUs if possible, to more closely correspond with the physical architecture. This in turn leads the user of the emulator to avoid the kind of programming that would take advantage of 100,000 CPUs. Already the notion that "you can emulate anything" productively falls out the window.

Likewise for type-tagged architectures. (The user always has an incentive to strip away the "unnecessary" tags.) Look at Common Lisp and its "optimize" directives. The result is inevitably that somewhere in the system, there will be "C-style," non-type-tagged code. This is a Bad Thing.
Kriby - A file-based CMS
Youm e takbeer sms messages-wishes & greetings - Pakistan Day sms
IPv6 is Here
The life of an HTML HTTP request
Keep the Internet Open - Vint Cerf Op-Ed about ITU/UN
Each meal did not cost AOL anywhere near $10. The cost to AOL was marginal because they already had purchased all the food and drinks to cater to everyone else in the building at all times. That gives them good economies of scales. Furthermore, his use of office space, gym equipment and all the other perks and amenities he used also cost AOL marginally. It's a stretch to say he financially impacted AOL in any way (unless you factor how the building's insurers decide to factor his squatting stunt into increased risk and higher insurance rates, but that is also a stretch).

However, I do agree that he saved over $2,000, since he saved the difference between what it would have cost him to purchase his food and perks at market price elsewhere and what they actually cost.
Actually, in Brazil at least, everyone thinks about fuel usage in km/liter (normally with two measures for city and roads).
Correct...you need to clearly identify what it does and why I want it. After having to scroll down to see "How it Works" I still don't get it. Change the wording on "Exercises are designed to induce practical experiences of various aspects of compassion." And give me some screenshots that I can actually see. Cool idea.
Are you a programmer? Is the docing full automatic? Until know the only automatic thing was the ATV right?
They could add support for GCC (MinGW) and ship it.
Generally speaking it's that they haven't had their 'ah-ha' moment of monetization yet that Google had with ad-words.

Some think it'll never come. But it's a factor.
I don't know. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have wanted to raise $100billion. What would they do with it except buy back stock after a crash?
Apple can't think of any use for their $100b in cash, and they're a hardware company with sprawling operations on three continent, and a capital-intensive retail division on four! (They're doing buybacks and dividends with their cash.)

By contrast, the amount FB actually raised, which is considerably less than that, they're acting like they need or have good use for.

This is just a theory, of course, and perhaps you are right that Facebook would have been HAPPY to raise a hundred billion dollars it has no use for. (Perhaps as part of stock dumping by big shareholders, who don't care what happens after this.) The above is just a guess. But I want to repeat my reason for it, which is that I have been extremely impressed by the expansiveness of Facebook's vision to date, and its execution on it. If they do have something big in mind, it's not unprecedented for them to be able to execute on it; I have some faith in their ability to do so, versus lots of other companies that suddenly realize they can think a lot bigger now that they have all this cash, but have no record of doing so. We'll find out if there's anything like this that Facebook has in mind soon enough...
Eliciting emotion
Is there some use agreement that prevents this plugin from submitting the like programmatically?
Show HN: todaywasgreat.com - a blog to promote positive thinking.
Regarding the UI, have you looked at the "Settings" page? Most of the UI is fully customizable -- you can change almost all of the colours you see, you can even remove many features such as the icons, sidebar, 0-click box, even the ads!

You can also adjust the layout of your results: alignment, page width, font and font size, underlining of links, etc.

Clearly they've provided a multitude of options, you just need to try them out.

Also, they do allow site search using the same syntax as Google.
I think that's exactly what people are basing their bets on... that Facebook just hasn't figured out a way to monetize properly, but that it will.
I appreciate your compliment, which describes exactly my aims with writing style. It's actually much harder to write that way then stringing together a technical guide for the technical, which is what the first draft looks like for many of my posts. By far the hardest thing I ever wrote on my site was the extensive series on password management, which is a more technically challenging subject.

I'm really appreciating your posting it here as it caught the attention of Adam Pash at Lifehacker, who will be publishing it today or early next week. I made it clear with him that the audience is mainstream, not custom builders, so hopefully he includes an appropriate preface.

It's funny how some answers to tech questions are really very simple. My entire article can be boiled down to one sentence: If you want a quiet PC for mainstream purposes (no heavy gaming) for less than $700, simply get a Mac Mini or a laptop that has a mobile chip inside from the following chip familes . . .
Self Drive Car Hire Nairobi Airport | Kenya
not really
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_proper_abbreviation_fo...
Conversions in eCommerce: A Few Tricks from Number 10
Here is a paper I found extremely useful when studying Lock Free data structures. It focuses on linked lists, but has a nice exposition of the idea: http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~ruppert/papers/lfll.pdf
Dawkins' decades-long reductionist insistence on the supremacy of genes is incoherent. Organisms do not exist in a vacuum, they interact with other organisms in their environment in myriad cooperative and competitive ways, and that affects which organisms survive and reproduce and which do not

Beyond that, it's becoming increasingly clear the genes aren't some recipe for making an organism, they're much more like a complicated self-referential computer program for manipulating reality. This genetic reductionism is like refusing to think or talk about computer software as anything but 1s and 0s

Wilson says "Riak is succeeding because of its straightforward scalability" and Dawkins responds "show me which 1s and 0s make it scalable! I see no scalable 1s or 0s. you're wrong"
Top Tips for Self Harm Help For Parents
Part of self harm help is knowing that being close to individuals who self harm like cutting or burning themselves makes coping really tough and sometimes hard to comprehend.
"New companies" versus "companies that go IPO" are completely different categories.

It's an obvious point when you think about it. This is survivorship bias: many new companies fail (with a return of ~zero) before becoming a part of the IPO sample.
The following banks and financial institutions also silently discard case-sensitivity:

Citibank

Chase

Wells Fargo

E-Trade

US Bank

Fidelity Investments

SECU

HSBC

TechCU
NRGramKit - an Objective-C block-based Instagram API wrapper for iOS
We've just released the code for this. It's the same code we use in our Instamap app, that allows you to browse instagram from iPad and iPhone.
Hope you fork it :)
Similarly, with the MPG or GP100M question, use the measurement that's most convenient for answering the question at hand. If you want to know how much fuel/money it'll take to go to Chicago, use GP100M. If you want to know what destinations are within reach for a certain amount of fuel/money, use MPG.

Right, and the first is way more common.
Maybe we because we don't know better. Or we're happy to think that complexity makes us feel as if we're smart.

But these days, scientists and engineers are looking at mother nature for examples:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-08/13-year-old...

While there's rebuttal about why the solution above won't work:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/why-13-year-ol...

It's still gives us some perspective and thought of how nature restructures things in a certain way. We could possibly build on that.

Ant traffic is handled by several simple rules. Maybe there's something we can learn from them too? We're already considering the removal of traffic lights - initially thought to help manage traffic flow. Do we necessarily need to manage them? Maybe.. maybe not.
Or if you care just use an authenticator which adds significant entropy without forcing you to remember anything.

http://us.blizzard.com/store/search.xml?q=authenticator they all have free android / iOS apps.
> Why does ls have dozens of tangled options? Because users, even Unix users, are not overly fond of the first two points of the Unix philosophy.

No, ls(1) is flexible because the philosophy is to do one thing and do it well.

ls(1) lists information about files. That's what `man ls` says it will do, and whichever flags you pass, that's what it's going to do. Providing a lot of control over how exactly it does that is (imho) doing it well.
You could just take a photo of the sculpture and paint it on your phone with a cheap editing app. You would just need to infer the shadow areas and paint them black, and the sunny parts white squares. QR codes were made to be very resilient to noise, and I can attest that you can mess with them quite a bit before they won't decipher. My boss asked me to take a QR code linking to our website and to try and rearrange some of the squares to be our initials. I got a few to work, and learned that the Reed Solomon encoding duplicates the data so much that this egregious manipulation was still acceptable.
Also, to address this comment in the thread:

> This means they probably store passwords in plain text, unsalted, etc. This is unbelievable.

It absolutely does not make that any more likely. All you have to do is normalize it to upper/lower case before hashing and you have case insensitivity.
Sounds like the beach is full of grumpy people. That doesn't happen often.
Xkcd on Crowdsourcing
So if Microsoft requested 543,000 links be removed from Google's index in just one month, it really makes me wonder how much of Bing is censored.
If the original thesis managed to get published in Science, then it is indeed scientifically acceptable (which is quite different from "accepted by the scientific community"), and worthy of debate. The fact that it is receiving strong criticism does not mean it should be discarded right away. It simply means that it goes again the mainstream conceptions.

When you have studied evolution the computational way --like I did-- you have an idea of how many hidden dynamics and synergies are going on. Evolution is one incredibly complex phenomenon. Truth is we don't understand that well what drives it --yet some of us seem supremely confident in the current mainstream theory (which seems a little too simple to me to account for all I've been witnessing).

In the case of Dawkins I suppose that confidence is not entirely unrelated to the fact that he considerably helped to propel that theory to its current acceptance level. Scientists should not cherish their own ideas that much, it's not healthy for scientific progress.
How the news industry is missing the point
Think of energy. The higher orbit has higher energy with respect to the earth -- gravitational, and by virtue of comparing stable orbits, also kinetic. Dragon will "catch up" with the space station by converting some additional chemical energy (propellant) into kinetic energy, moving into and matching the station's orbit (and gaining the additional gravitational potential). (Or, given the small adjustment needed, perhaps mechanical energy, depending upon how the positional thrusters work -- compressed gas?)

Ugh, my physics classes are a long time away. Hope that's worded halfway comprehensibly.
Yes, I remember ordering a single candy bar from Kozmo when I worked in Chicago in 1999 just to see if they would deliver it. They did.
TSA Ready to Spend $3M on Apple Gear
Not true at all. My password is long and complex, complete with many different special characters.
Welsh city becomes world’s first “Wikipedia town”
Life-Like Wooden Sculptures by Bruno Walpoth
A trial without me linking up my facebook would be good, or a really clear example of what will happen. People want to see visually not read a whole bunch of text and imagine what it will be like.
Isn't this basically how programming computers works? You take data that already exists, pass it over channels that already exist through hard-wired processors?
Different ways of connecting Flex to PHP
In fact, in some anthropological studies hunter gatherers that don't know arithmetic mostly said that the value halfway between one and nine is three.

Which still doesn't produce the right answer; you save three times as much gas going from 10MPG to 30 compared to going from 30 to 90. (More generally, going from k to kn MPG saves n times as much as going from kn to k*n^2).
At the time I was a hobbyist straight out of uni where £100 was rather a lot of money (yeah, they always convert dollars to pounds over here, greedy buggers). And I didn't need a manual as I picked up a 'learn VB6 in 30 days book'. Classic.

The trouble with all these 'cheap cause you use it all the time' tools is that to start with you don't want to use them all the time. So they're relatively very expensive.

For example I was just re-learning programming to prove a point to my boss that the internal IT program sucked.
"The two years for an MS is also typically considered to have a great payoff ratio "

That is debatable IMHO. I do not undermine the value of a graduate degree btw. But the pay off part is something I am not always convinced of.
If you register, you can download the slides separately.
It’s a lot easier to maintain an orthogonal design when your software isn’t being used.

Mentally, I'm translating this to "it's okay to have messy design if your software is used". This is probably the most common excuse for writing bad software.

Some things in Unix really should follow Unix philosophy more closely.
very very little, it's just doing read(), counting the bytes, then write(), with some screen output every few seconds.

(hell it could even use splice() and never even see the bytes)
How to Sell if You Hate Selling
"A[n]yone have experience as to how Python compare to R, Matlab (Octave)"

Amusing coincidence: this article appeared on Slashdot this Wednesday:

Comparing R, Octave, and Python for Data Analysis:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/05/23/1956219/compar...
Spain's Basque Country's administration to share all its software
I think you are missing the point. The whole conversation about what something should be trading at is stupid. It is worth what it actually trades at. If it wasn't worth the trading price then it wouldn't trade at that price. What it should trade at is always what it trades at so it is foolish to speculate about what the price should be. If enough people will realize that the stock is over-valued, over-hyped and over-priced it will very quickly start trading at the price it "should" trade at.

The GP's comment reminds me of the famous Bill Parcells quote: "You are what your record says you are".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs follows the Unix philosophy. A lot of legacy has been shed. I can count 13 options to ls, 11 options to sed and just 5 to sed.

The standard Plan 9 shell, Rc, is described in mere ~500 lines of manpage, while Bash takes whooping ~5400 lines.

Oh, and there is no `dll hell' in P9 :-)
I have literally no idea what this does.
That's an interesting idea. I'm coding Direct Store Delivery software that manages inventory through wireless handheld devices. The problem is that a lot of shipping is from vendor to store directly and the receivers are required to validate the shipment has the correct products, quantity, cost/deal invoice details and then work it out with the vendor delivery driver as needed. There are companies that strategically attempt to offload certain products that the store doesn't want at that point in time but will save the vendor $ if they can ship today vs. next week when different cost/deals take effect.
That last bit Proves that Facebook truly is the work of one man.
Make every bot play each other once or multiple times.
In a sense, yes. However, some of the things ls does are 'borrowed functionality'. That the displayed listing can be sorted by a flag to ls is a bit of an aberration in the Unix philosophy. We're meant to have a separate tool for sorting - sort.

I agree that a certain flexibility is useful in the Unix tools, but a well-founded argument can be made that flexibility costs you simplicity.
What ethical boundary did he cross?

He broke a rule, probably a few laws, but no person was harmed or in any way negatively affected, it is certainly not 'blatantly unethical'
> No, ls has dozens of tangled options because the philosophy is to "do one thing and do it well".

Do you mean that in order to truly do well its one thing (list information about files), that ls had to incorporate things like these?

-o List in long format, but omit the group id.

-T When used with the -l (lowercase letter ``ell'') option, display complete
time information for the file, including month, day, hour, minute, second,
and year.

-x The same as -C, except that the multi-column output is produced with entries
sorted across, rather than down, the columns.

Some degree of feature creep is probably inevitable, but a lot of the common utilities now seem to lean towards "offer a flag for everything" rather than "do a small number of permutations on one thing; create pipelines for the rest". (Note: These three options are all from OSX's BSD-derived ls. GNU's version is almost certainly more complex still.)
Totally. I'm about to add a newborn to a 2 year old. Getting up early is an unrealistic option because I'm already up early with the kids. Working on side projects after 9p works best for me. Kids are in bed at 7p or so, hang out with the wife for a couple hours and wind down, then start on some projects. I wonder if other fathers who work on side projects have similar schedules.
It would be opt-in, of course :)
The glossing-over cassandra (because of Digg history etc..) was the point in the talk when I started raising eyebrows. Engineers evaluating systems should let the systems speak for themselves.

We have a fairly small cassandra cluster in production, serving over 50x the volume they mentioned in their talk, with good latency (real-time bidding) and not-too-painful operational footprint.
I suppose, but I think this comic is more related to how 'mash up' businesses are popping up on the Internet everyday.

Example: Zynga depending on Facebook who depends on Akamai who depends on L3. There are a lot of layers involved.
I'd rephrase it more like, "Clean design is a means to pleasing users; it's not an end in itself."

When is it okay to get messy? When it's a net win for the user experience.
> Exercises are designed to induce practical experiences of various aspects of compassion.

I have no idea what this could mean. I think you should have some examples.

EDIT: And reword that. It sounds like corporate-speak, of all things.
Don't Let the Minimum Win Over the Viable
Makers - Part I, is in fact very good. Just pretend that there is no part II or III.
This is just awesome.

I'm sitting in the middle of the French country side in a building that was built during Galileo's life time with these links up across three monitors:

http://www.n2yo.com/?s=38348

mms://a1709.l1856953708.c18569.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1709/18569/v0001/reflector:53708

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html?param=stati...

Watching all of this makes me realise just how lucky we are to be alive at this point in human history.

Oh and looks like first capture attempt could be as soon as 20ish minutes from now (i.e. 14:02 UTC).

Edit: they've just given a go for capture.

Edit 2: and here's a screen shot of the Dragon capsule and space station arm: http://imgur.com/OWit7
My hope in using the phrase "operator overloading" was to bring to mind the familiar concept of operator ad-hoc polymorphism (which I would maintain duck typing is an example of) rather than to misleadingly describe the internals of the Python language. Nonetheless you are quite right on the details.
Funny thing. The last time I checked, I think it was Windows Vista, the install fonts dialog was basically the same as the one in Windows 3.1.
Well, the analytical question here is: what is the appropriate sample for comparison?

The article uses US IPOs 1996-2010 as the initial sample. I'd like to know how sensitive this is to expanding or narrowing that range. How does that average change if you adjust the range? (The academic article may have some note of this.)

Then, the article makes comparison to Google's current price-to-sales ratio as a benchmark (5.51-1). The analytic justification is nothing more than "[s]ince Facebook FB -0.64% is most often compared to Google GOOG -0.66%..."

Some questions I'd ask about this:

- What did Google's P/S ratio look like at IPO, and what was its growth?

- What does Facebook's P/S ratio look like compared a broader sample of tech companies' P/S ratios? Or including non-tech companies?

- Why not use price-to-earnings ratio? (I'm not a finance guy, but the subtle difference in wording here gives me pause to at least investigate the question.)

So what you're hearing me say is: we need sensitivity analysis. The assumed benchmarks appear arbitrary enough that we have to see how the results change when you adjust the inputs.

Lastly, there's the age-old fundamentals versus intangibles question: investors make their decisions based on both. The fundamental analysis (of earnings, etc., like the article does) is not deterministic: it just gives you context. Intangibles (faith in management, broader understanding of how the market will shift and affect the firm's competitive position) matter, too. They're just, well, intangible.

But also included under the umbrella of intangibles is how investor sentiment toward the company may change. If people think FB is going to make some huge announcements in the next year that will send the share price skyrocketing for a short (but not sustainable) high watermark, then that potential short-term return is worth buying.

[Edit 5/25 6:57a PT - changed range from 96-00 to 96-10 based on correction. Thanks!]
Controlling interfaces in the browser with JavaScript and the Kinect