skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it be so hard to use a journalling filesystem, snapshot backups, or even throw the site folders into git (not the binary files, obviously!) - then you could view all changes made to the code recently, look for changes in common between the sites, and look for changes only within .php files, outside of times the site was being upgraded by the customer or host?
Ask HN: Does your product use affiliate commissions for revenue?
Being an affiliate for a long time in the startup world, I was wondering today how many people on HN use affiliate commissions for revenue with their products.

You don't need to give numbers or in-depth detail, I simply think it would be neat to know who is using it and if it has been successful, as well as share experiences about making it work.

Here's my info:

AppZorz, Inc.
2 products use affiliate commissions and currently generate a few k/month, growing quickly

Challenges: we've found it somewhat hard to educate affiliate managers about what we do. They come around almost every time however; after many rejections of our applications we decided to email them directly before applying to their program.
Your trainees might stick around for decades if you offered a superlative work arrangement.
The subscript i denotes that the variable belongs to a single user i. The tick at the top is pronounced 'prime' and is used to differentiate between versions or iterations.
I agree with her not finding good pants to wear ( I know this from my wife). The nice & affordable clothing market is a hard one to crack I think. Women do face a lot of issues with sizing that have nothing to do with looks or vanity. The components for a good fit are universal but women have an especially hard time finding good items. Especially if they bike+work.

The last time I went to the mall I saw way too many cocktail dresses for women but was hard pressed to find active clothing for my wife which looked good. This is a non trivial problem which needs some good brains behind it. No - I don't want to pay for Rapha for some such brand.
I wanted to add a perspective from someone who comes from a European country (Portugal) and have been living in the California for the past 4 and half years. Forgive me for the generalizations but one thing that I admire about Americans (at least Californians) is the strong positive "can-do" attitude to life. A fire that gets people to start their own businesses and think of new opportunities. It is obviously hard to pint-point the origin of any cultural trait but I believe that it also stems from the positive re-enforcement that this article is talking about. Along with most people of my generation that I know of, I was brought up with exactly the sort of message that this teacher is conveying ("you're not special"). I really think this contributes to the fact that Portuguese are one of the most risk averse people in the world. Even when we start our own businesses we pick very safe jobs (http://mvalente.eu/2011/03/08/the-paradox-of-portuguese-entr...)

I realize that it might be exaggerated positive re-enforcement in the US and that this can have very serious negative consequences. Learning to fail and balancing your future expectations is a requirement for good mental health. Just keep in mind that there are certainly good things about this attitude.
It has always been possible to hide the ribbon. When you click on the top-level menu, it reappears.
I'm glad Posner and a few other justices seem to have an interest in discrediting frivolous patent cases but can they do anything other than point a dirty finger at corporations for abusing the patent system and dismiss their cases with prejudice? Posner can't shift around his appointments indefinitely.

It's obvious that most HNers feel the patent system won't change any time soon or they wouldn't be filling this thread with a discussion on the definition of a line segment.

Edit: I'm not saying he should do more. I was asking if he could do more from his position. I recognize that he's bringing needed attention to the subject and setting an example that will probably be followed by others in the judiciary.
Sales has its own high-risk / high-reward culture that goes along with the people who hunger for it as a career. Since most sales positions are paid on commission, failure to meet sales goals tends to result in a firing.
I disagree with what your idea of proper hiring apparently is; to hire and test out a lot of people often is better than to spend extra time finding the right person. In my experience, a work environment that is a revolving door of often failing new staff is a waste of everybody's time, whereas a work environment with more carefully selected new staff that sometimes fails is only a waste of management's time. Such are the burdens of management.
DotDotPwn v3.0 - Directory Traversal fuzzer
Why the hell would I want to pay the job switching costs to work at that company when they have an itchy trigger finger, especially if I'm doing pretty well where I am already?
>> or something else entirely

"making eye contact with your betters"

"choosing the wrong religion"

"whatever else I feel like, but can't write down without getting sued?"
Euclid, Book 1, Definition 1. "A point is that which has no part."
It might be worthwhile to take a look at certain types of game engine architectures.

Since modularity is one of the keypoints of how this editor/game engine work so well together, it's probably a good idea to have some idea of how to structure game components to lessen the 'ball of mud' feeling.

I've been pretty fascinated with data-oriented "entity/component" systems for a while, as opposed to heavily inheritance based models. There's a decent introduction here: http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy...

It seems like a lot of modern game engines (one example would be Unity) utilize this approach to varying degree.
The quote is from an earlier ruling, not from the PDF. The full quote is:

"Motorola is hereby ordered to propose a claim construction of the term 'predetermined number of channel resources' in patent '898 at tomorrow's Markman hearing. Motorola's contention that the term has a 'plain and ordinary meaning' is ridiculous; Motorola seems to have forgotten that this is a jury trial. The term 'predetermined' means 'determined prior to some other event,' and what that 'other event' is is not obvious in context and certainly will not be obvious to a jury. If Motorola does not want Apple's proposal to be accepted, it must propose some alternative."

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/03/judge-posner-praises-appl...
Achieving a specific mood or "feel" for an environment requires someone who is very sensitive to lighting, color, and architecture, and who has knowledge of techniques to achieve certain looks.

For example, if you want an ominous feel to a cathedral, you need to know what light colors are more ominous than others, what direction of lighting (maybe bottom up, rather than from the top), what types of lights...many dim point lights? or single directional lights?, if light scattering through a medium like fog would look good, etc etc. And also keeping in mind functional aspects like, can the player still see items or things he needs to do, even with all of this specific lighting.

Another example might be that while lighting and materials might behave naturally, sometimes they still behave in undesireable ways. Suppose the angle of the sun reflected off of a reflective surface right into the player's face right while he was at a specific location where he needed to do something. If you can't move the surface, can you shift the light? Will that effect the scene much? Maybe now that you shifted the light, the rays of light that were going through a tree branch beautifully are not there any more.
WinAUTOPWN v3.0 - System vulnerability exploitation Framework
There is no reason to quarrel about the meaning of 'significance' in statistical testing vs. in natural language. Just look at figs. 4 and 5 in the paper, and see that mean times spent for the scanner task were:

5.17 hours (dynamical typing)
7.71 hours (static typing)

And that the difference in statistically significant (p=0.04, Mann-Whitney U-test). Whether 5 vs. 8 hours is significant in the natural language sense, everyone can decide for themselves.
What I mean is that I'm terrible at reading things on Friday afternoon. We're not in disagreement (success != quality) and I'm being pedantic :)
Fantastic. All I care about is the content. In any case, your comment was no simple personal testimonial, but an attempt to tell carsongross that the "crowd was against him". This is just the conventional wisdom attack again.

That is not the case anymore. The crowd is not against him.

It's too bad that pg has hidden upvote totals, as the bien pensants who support the bailout policies of Bush, Bernanke[1], and Obama would realize that millions of informed people now oppose them. To be an informed person, it is no longer sufficient to parrot what is read in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

[1] Ben Bernanke, Bush appointee.
Well the comments there are more or less that, which is sad to see. I like that the VS team (and many teams it seems) are responding well to public feedback and making smart decisions that can make everyone happy. It's just sad to see people can't respect the VS team's default decision, even when they agree to expose it as a setting. That's users for you.
(You can do that in VB.NET and C# today, as long as you're writing a 32-bit application.)
>I agree - I didn't explain this very well. The former utilizes taxpayer money, the latter doesn't. The first is an all-out investment, the second, a loan.

The Fed's loans are backed by taxpayer money, right? (Or by its ability to print money, which is a stealth tax on everyone who holds dollars). Put it another way, it's giving these companies for free something (a loan on generous terms) that would be worth quite a bit on the open market, and that belongs to us.

>The Fed has a mandate to ensure financial stability by providing such a loan facility (why it didn't do so for Lehman - and whether it neglected its duty - is still a very controversial topic) - so I wouldn't consider a statutory duty to be a discretionary bailout.

That sounds to me like there is a statutory requirement for the Fed to perform bailouts under certain circumstances. It doesn't make them any less of a bailout.
Looks really interesting and like pfraze I think it's important that we rethink the way we build our sites and applications; focus on composing applications out of reusable tiny JS components (widgets) will make them more robust and easier to develop in the long run, once we get out of the teething stage of trying to figure out how to structure it all.

That said, the architecture they're proposing here seems a bit convoluted; is there really no simpler way to package together your widgets than calls that bounce around to different objects and 'core' methods?
Silverlight is the next VB6
Go solves almost all of the problems that C introduces, how's that sound?
And I've also learned that today. So I guess they're not the best example here...
> people rarely fundamentally change

Perhaps you should stop beating them with a stick and offer a carrot? Just a thought.
Right, I didn't make that clear:

A human mistake comes from the fact that we are fallible humans with crappy memories and fat fingers and a working set of beliefs about the world that may be entirely wrong. Type something in wrong? Why didn't you verify or have someone else verify? Forget something or leave something out? Where's the checklist that you made for yourself to prevent that from happening? Make a bad assumption? Why assume at all when you could have verified?

You get the reprimand to be reminded that, while pushing the envelope is a good thing, there are real consequences to screwing up and not having all of the loose ends tied up. Saying "I didn't know" or "I didn't realize" is like saying "it's not my fault". In reality, you can't prevent these things from happening, but you better damn well try. That's what you get paid to do, in other words, to prevent your humanity from screwing up your hard work and brilliance.

Oh, I should have mentioned, that you're expected to yell at yourself more than your boss does. It really helps prevent having your boss do it for you!

But, like I mentioned in point 3), these are covered by management. No need to have them get in your review or affect your future at the company. You're human, it's OK, just be sure and learn from it.

A dumb mistake is one where you know better. Like you just decide out of the blue that you'll take that call from an old client during business hours, while your boss's boss is taking clients through the building. Or you were told not to do something, explicitly, but you decide that you'll do it anyway. Repeated mistakes are ones where you make the same mistake and didn't learn your lesson.

Hope that helps!
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
How do you explain Java's massive uptake. It can't be it that it solved some problem uniquely that no other language did (whatever that was in 1995). Without the massive marketing and development by Sun, IBM and Oracle who wanted to use it to undermine the windows platform I doubt Java would have taken off the manner it has.

Same thing with C and C++. Without AT&T's backing of Unix and C it is highly unlikely C would have ended up where it is right now. The initial backing of C++ by AT&T was certainly instrumental in pushing it forward.

Similar examples
Python -- interesting niche language until Google picked it up and started pushing it around 2004.

FORTRAN -- IBM's muscle

C# -- doesn't solve anything that Java or C++ couldn't do in 2000 except Microsoft wanted their own proprietary language.

It seems that solving some problem might be optional, but commerical backing and long term support is essential.
Global warming helps Arctic algae suck CO2
Breakthrough driver’s mirror eliminates blind spots without warping the world
> “Maybe the solution isn’t entirely technical,”

Gee... you think? Programming languages are designed for humans - computers get by just fine with bits and bytes. And a programming language must not only communicate something to the computer, but also to any other humans who have anything to do with said system, if it's doing its job well.

So the problem is entirely social. I wrote something about it a while back:

http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics
I guess we have different views of what's important. There are maybe 2-3 Abel's per century. Gauss completed some of his greatest work in his early twenties, but that doesn't mean that everyone else did as well as he did. I'd love for everyone to be Gausses and Abels, but the truth is, they aren't. Neither do they want to be. Neither are they unhappy "pissed off accountants" because they aren't, like you describe. Neither are they idiots because they aren't math-savvy, like you imply.

I'd rather human development and quality of life come before space travel. If there are junior Abels among us, they are going to stand out regardless of whether you teach them subject X in highschool or not. Furthermore, they are going to pursue a specialized education (college) in said subject anyway. I don't think not recognizing geniuses is a problem we have since geniuses tend to be fairly resourceful. Thus, we can focus on improving the standard of education for everyone else. I'm not suggesting a ban on the study of mathematics altogether.

There is no causation link as you imagine. No amount of increased math in highschool is going to breed geniuses like Abels. Increased general skills like logic and problem solving is going to result in higher ability and better education for almost everyone.
In my experience salespeople do need some ramp-up time (although it depends on inside/outside, size of sale, etc.), so 30 days may not be reasonable.

Commission vs. base actually argues for letting them stay LONGER. They self-select to leave if not making commission -- at a startup, that could be due to the product not being in the right place, though, so in a startup you often pay more base than at an established provider.

The other issue is that the cost of a "seat" for a salesperson, especially outside, can be really high, independent of production. It's pretty reasonable in enterprise for a great salesperson to be burning $500-1000/day in expenses (flying every couple of days, hotels, cars, meals with clients, etc.). Plus, potentially needing a sales engineer or engineering support from the development team, and of course the opportunity cost of giving them certain sales leads ("these leads are shit! give me the Glengarry leads!").

Enterprise sales is one of the reasons it sucks to do an Enterprise startup.
This might be true, but once the Wii U starts to receive legitimate reviews from credible sources, these 'faux' reviews will be crushed by the authority of Gamespot, CNET, etc. providing real reviews that are accumulating great number links. Right now, these fake reviews are killing the SERPs because there is nothing else to return for reviews of the Wii.
Time to go read http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved... again.
Dave Platt. The man who predicted the iPhone would be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld. http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-...
The best means of colliding MD5 seems to require one collision block plus some extra "birthday" bits, all of which are controllable by the attacker. [1]

The idea is that you have two messages, m1 and m2, or m1 and m1' if you prefer, and you vary bits in both until you get a collision. You need some area of m1 and m2 that doesn't matter for the application, so that you can change those bits and find a collision. Since all bits of m1 are supplied when entering the password, you have no ability to modify it without getting the user to change his/her password.

If you could collide any arbitrary m1 as it's given to you, then attacks like fake certs with signed MD5 hashes could create the fake cert after submitting it to the CA and getting the signed cert back, rather than before.

Also, the collision process requires knowledge of m1 so you can see the intermediate hash states. If you know m1, the password/passphrase, why are you trying to find a new m1' that hashes to the same value rather than using the pass you already know?

An attack of concern for using MD5 as a password hashing step would be a first preimage attack. [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=md5+collision+block+birthday... (first link at present is http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/SingleBlock/ )

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_attack
NDC 2012 - Azure Dancing Girls. Skip to 1:30 for the lyrics.
But there is no search facility on HN

Odd--there is on mine, at the bottom of the page, labeled "Search".
>Say said it best: when there's not enough cash available to satisfy desires, people find ways around it. If you can arrange to be that way, you can still profit.

The only way I'm able to interpret this as practical advice is "invest in the mafia". Unless you're talking about building up your personal skills - which, while good advice (if you can do something other people want then you'll never go hungry, no matter how bad the economy), doesn't really scale.
This video would be thoroughly embarrassing even without the penis reference.

I can't tell what the relationship is between NDC and Microsoft Norway, but I imagine there will be apologies.
It's an instance of market adoption of a product, being a solution to an urgent problem helps. Many programming languages are scripting languages of a platform, and it's the platform that solves the problem. In general it's subject to all the vagrancies of marketing, especially whether it gets publicized/promoted/pushed. If there are competing products, and both do the same job well, probably one will win (e.g. python is used for integration).

BTW: What problem did Java solve? It seemed to be intended for settop boxes; then for web applets; but serendipitously got traction in the enterprise. It sounds almost a counter-example (is it?)
It's not one organization, it's the commonality I've noticed from three of the ten that I've worked for that had fantastic teams. The other seven have had wildly different measures and procedures for employees, but each with worse results.
System improves automated monitoring of security cameras
Forget running Photoshop on Wine, or dual-booting. Run Windows XP within Virtualbox on Linux, and set it to "Seamless" mode. XP is lightweight and runs well on Virtualbox, although you may want to use the 64-bit version of XP if you'll be doing a lot of work with Photoshop. And under Seamless mode, it's almost as Windows apps are running natively on Ubuntu (or whatever Linux distro). I've not run Photoshop on Virtualbox (although I know others do successfully), but I regularly run a number of relatively complex Windows applications (such as Office) in this manner as part of my job. And it works so much better for me than Wine, or dual booting.
I know these guys are a fixture, but I have never been able to stand them. Their voices to me have been like fingernails on chalkboards.

I would drive with the radio off until their show was over and only after, would I then turn it on to hear wait wait...
Muppet Chaos Theory
I actually rather enjoyed the analogy section as they were like small logic puzzles and far more enjoyable than the incredibly dry passages they choose for the comprehension sections. Admittedly, I do enjoy esoteric vocabulary and have an unusually good memory for it.

With regard to the removal, I had thought it was due to complaints of cultural bias towards upper class whites; the canonical example something along like "oarsman : _______ as runner: marathon"
In this economy its more like handing out knives, dice, and free liquor to the farm hands hoping a few get their throats slit by the end of the season.
Of course you are special, why would you be any different?
Getting back to UE4, if its lights behave more like real-world lights it may allow game artists to translate real-world lighting knowledge into games or let them spend less time working around kinks in the engine.
Redditor Does 'I have Cancer' AMA & Gets Over $9k in donations
I'm now seeing some HTML5 stuff. Certainly having an Ivy Bridge i3 available for $400 will accelerate that trend.
"there are clear business reasons for technology companies to focus their efforts on women. But few do."

Well, for example I am creating a writers' tool (basically a markdown editor). I wonder if there is anything in the product design with which I can target man/woman. I was thinking in terms of ease of use, intuitivnes, efficiency, etc...

I am thinkging in terms of power users / casual users, geeks / non-geeks, etc... but should I think in terms of women / men?

The article says Asus has sexist tweets... Wouldn't it be sexist if I had prejudices about women's use of a 'word processor'? I am not cynical, I genuinely ask this.
I've seen a lot of projects like this come and go or, most often, sit around getting few updates. For some reason I started to follow Matt on Twitter when he first launched LDS and I've been impressed at how he's kept chipping away at it making it better. (His technique for catching people who don't use his links to register the domains found is genius and, I've inferred, works well.)

He just put a graph of his traffic on Twitter as well and it clearly shows the value of continuing to hammer away at a project over time rather than releasing and forgetting about it: http://cl.ly/3C181Q3A1n2k142C0c0L

So big thumbs up to Matt.