skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you were located in Boston (or SV), you'd probably have your pick of startups that would give you a paid summer internship. The best thing you can do is get involved in your local startup scene. Most of us doing software startups don't care much about age or education level. Passion and portfolio are far more important.
could you make a list of those books that formed you?
Ajax, notably, is a Microsoft invention.

To put that into proper context, XmlHttpRequest was a hack by a single person at Microsoft -- with zero input or coordination or working groups or long term planning -- on the MSXML team to do a favour to the Outlook team. Further it could only happen because of ActiveX, and paralleled various other light request tools that existed at the time.

XmlHttpRequest is a great demonstration of a hacker getting a solution out there.

EDIT: Downvotes? I am intimately aware of how XmlHttpRequest came into existence, having been closely involved with its birth, so if someone has some correction to add, please add it. But in no universe does XmlHttpRequest vindicate Microsoft on moving web standards along. Their contribution was unintentional and largely accidental.
for those that don't understand the implications of this:

the runyons claim that the seeds got there accidentally, and imply that they had no knowledge of the seeds' origins. given that they also sprayed Roundup on their crops, the claim just makes no sense. if your crops are not "Roundup-ready", Roundup will kill your crops along with the weeds.

if it was really the wind that blew in some seeds, then they never would have sprayed Roundup on their crop.
Another Hack? Last.fm Warns Users to Change Their Passwords
we do live in a hypocrisy world, esp in US, just embrace that to make life easier.

I am wondering, they have a database that connects your name with the OSS project you're on(or any projects for that matter)? and it pops out once they input your passport number? quite surprised.
I think this is a phenomenal team building exercise, even if your entire team normally works from the same office.

Being in a place other than home removes all sorts of distractions from your regular life and you can focus on (a) work and (b) spending time getting to know your teammates, if that sort of thing is important to you.

Question: do you have rough guesstimate on what this sort of thing will cost per person, after all is said and done?

I'm guessing:
1000 airfare + 200/night/4 people for lodging + 50/person/day for food + 50/person/day for entertainment/booze ==

$12k for a 4 person team to go to spain from Chicago for 10 days? Is that about fair?
1000APIs is a small sample size.
There are two sides to the equation. Owning a credit card and using it and b) accepting a credit card and processing money. The latter part is all driven by local/national banks and rules and regulations.
I just started using Trello for this purpose, I love it: http://www.trello.com
I actually think it's harder for most companies to take a chance on someone remotely when they're so young.
Everything you say makes sense, but alas, the government is not always observed to be strong on logic.

But okay, given your argument, what do you think happened here, and why? Do you think this report is a complete fabrication?
I'd say play with embedded stuff to push your skills further. The arduino is a good simple start. Or you could go with a mini2440 board
that runs linux (android too).
First I want to say that, in many (most) cases, when people ask me what python web framework they should use, I wholeheartedly recommend Django.

Unless... the person is a weirdo, like me.

In most cases people are looking to prove some idea and they just want the web framework equivalent of "a car that gets me from point A to point B I don't care how.", Django gets the job done and in that capacity is really nice to use.

Personally I don't like using Django. I like to fiddle. I like to tweak. (I like my string beans quarantined!) I like my systems to work exactly the way I want them to work. I have strong opinions about how things should work and am not usually willing to compromise on fundamental issues.

Django does not (in general) make this easy. I wrote a post a while back about the hoops I had to jump through (and the source I had to spelunk through) just to use form field sets and to modify the error reporting (http://mikepk.com/2010/08/python_django_forms_errors_fieldse...).

The real tipping-point for me in not using Django was the ORM. I think it's great for getting up and running quickly but I tend to be of the "ORM-as-Vietnam-of-software-engineering" camp. It's partially due to my OCD/control-freak need to have maximum control and visibility of the RDBMS. I've been converted to using an ORM by SQLAlchemy, but mainly because the philosophy of that project is not to hide the RDBMS from you but to make it easier and more pythonic to work with.

While Django is theoretically decomposable, you lose the ability to use many of the plugins, apps, etc... the moment you deviate from the standard package / install. That's what the arrows in the slides indicate. If you're willing to get something that nearly approximates the functionality you need, and don't care that's it's not exactly what you want, then Django all the way.

Teh Awesome:
* Get up and running very quickly
* Lots of batteries included
* Great Docs
* Limited config hell

The Bad:
* Tight coupling of features and third party "apps"
* Yes you /could/ customize things but then you lose many of the benefits of why you're using Django in the first place
* Customization breaks things
* Too-strict templating, almost-python-like-but-not-quite
* ORM is of the "vietnam" variety
I just wanted to write the word "butt". Thanks for being cool about it. :)
In the modern era, at least, it's not strictly true that journalists were busy transcribing speeches; it's standard practice for a person giving a speech (especially in politics) to give copies of the speech text to the press, usually before the speech itself. Typically it's provided under an embargo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embargo_%28journalism%29), so the reporters can't actually report on it until the speech is over, but the extra lead time lets them start working on their stories early.

That's how you can see talking heads on CNN saying "we're told the President will talk a lot about taxes tonight," say, in the run-up to the State of the Union address -- they've gotten a copy of the speech from the White House, under an embargo. So they can't print the text of the speech right then, but they can allude generally to its contents.
They are at 99.97% uptime. It's not that easy to get to even 99.5%, just the flakiness of a standard uplink will put you below that.
Re "backchannel"s
Most conferences I've been to have had official irc channels designated for chatter during talks.

The point probably being that people chatting via text is less interrupting than speaking out loud and interrupting.
What luck.
Exactly. Have a look here for some information on how to do this: http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/designing-a-secure-rest-api-with...
The "What if the output changes?" argument doesn't hold water in my books. If the command supported JSON internally, then it can still change its JSON output. Either way, you have to handle it. If you're managing the filter yourself, then you can handle the change in the program's output while keeping the output of the filter unchanged.

Now, which is going to be easier to test with a new input scheme: the filter that only does one thing, or your program?
can anyone that has done the research write up the fixed and variable costs of different payment services and report back to us?
"But I guess we Australians should be used to being ripped off by now" With such a "dog beaten" attitude I'd say it's self fulfilling. Perhaps wait to see what those fees are, relative to your other options in Australia, before drawing such a depressing conclusion?
Amazon excluded those are PaaS.
17.3 MILLION MD5 hashes (unsalted, not that it matters), of which over 16 million have already been cracked.
So you see this border interrogation as part of a systematic policy to intimidate developers entering the United States with expertise in cryptographic dev? Gotta be honest, that seems like a wild and illogical extrapolation to me based on this anecdotal story.

Agreed. This is simply a case of border control agents going overboard. I'm not defending it for a second (as a US visa holder, I despise the process I have to go through every time I enter the country) but these agents aren't technically inclined in any way.

When you arrive at their desk, they ask "what do you do for a living and what does your company do?". If you answer "The company makes chat software", you'd walk straight through. If you say "The company makes encrypted, secure chat software" then they are going to ask further questions. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a watchlist of words to listen out for, and "encryption" is one of them. Encryption is subject to export controls:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...
What is it suppose to do?
There's no big announcement there that I see. They release a blog post like this at least once a week.
If its for your own purposes I don't see why its any different than archive.org. The intent isn't to make money, just archival.
ITunes Will Soon Be Obsolete
My company is creating a mobile classifieds platform. On the company blog, I've spent some time analyzing Craigslist scams ("Five Craigslist rental scams" http://invantory.com/2012/04/craigslist-rental-scam-crisis/ ) as well as spam ("Craigslist 'by dealer' categories and dealer spam", http://invantory.com/2012/04/craigslist-by-dealer-categories... ).

Craigslist puts in a lot of effort to warn people about common scams, yet the problem persists in the high-value categories. This is especially true of rentals -- I get a Google Alert every week of Craigslist-related crime appearing in news reports, and half or more are rental scams. How can people miss the warnings and get conned? Part of the reason relates to smart social engineering, as the OP suggested -- girls, convincing sob stories (active duty military deploying overseas is a common hook), well-written emails, great prices that are almost too good to be true. The scammers are constantly running tests to see what works best and then applying them to multiple areas. But the other thing is the nature of buyers, who may only come to Craigslist once every few years and may assume that because their last experience turned out good, their next one will, too.

On the spam front, "flagging" is one of the main weapons CL uses to fight things like overposting, top-posting, miscategorized posts, etc. Unfortunately the system has broken down in many markets. Check out some of the cities in Western Canada, which are overrun by spam (see "Craigslist Canada: Ticket spam, giant markets and dead areas" http://invantory.com/2012/04/craigslist-canada/ ). Dealers and spammers using manual or automated means simply overwhelm the categories, and there aren't enough active flaggers to mark the violators -- or people have simply given up.

Classified marketplaces really interested me, and if anyone wants to talk about Craigslist or mobile classifieds, I can be reached via the websites listed on my HN profile.
yes, a pretty old one. They haven't used that keyboard in years.
My comment was about simplicity and paradigms, with allusions to Thomas Khun's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...). You must have missed that because you're trying to pick a fight about scalability, which has nothing to do with my original comment.

Most of my work is with graphs so, for example, if you want to use a graph database to build a social graph with a Bayesian network, you wouldn't use most of Django's components such as auth and admin because they're tied to the ORM -- most of Django would just get in your way. It has nothing to with a Django-based site "outgrowing" auth.

Try to break out of your relational mindset and understand the thread before you decide to go off. And regarding my "paltry 3.79 karma average," you do realize the median for the leaderboard (http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders) is 3.975, right? Again, know what you're talking about.
The state of Healthcare Informatics in virtually all its manifestations is outrageous. Do I think Dr Chrono is "the" solution? No. Does it help move the ball forward? Yes. And for that, I applaud them.
We've recently begun to move our entire infrastructure to external providers (vps and cloud) because we felt that we couldn't guarantee a sufficiently high level of quality and had to devote too much time and money to operations.

In over four months we've probably already had more downtime than in the past 5 years. Despite paying quite a lot for "redundant", clustered offerings. There was one nasty bug in the hypervisor that killed the entirety of one of our providers' vps infrastructure - for over a day.

Our experience with "the cloud" was a little bit better, but we aren't entirely satisfied.

I don't know, maybe we should just order services from three different providers mirror our applications ourselves as a fail-over mechanism.
It's so scary to think that our entire startup almost died with this glitch. Our enterprise customers use our product in the mornings... this happened at 9-fucking-am right during our peak hours.

Obviously it's our fault for not having a redundant system / for trusting heroku. Though I still can't help but be a little pissed as I email 100 people about how sorry I am for their service disruption. Heroku didn't email me.
> Now we have a test app engine account

That's good practice. You test locally, then test on a real deployment environment, then deploy to production. You should also use app versions and test new ideas on new versions and always plan for rolling back.
But lets be honest, Steve wasn't a paragon of virtue himself. Actually the more I read about him (just read the June Fast company article) the more I think he lets his emotions dictate his corporate actions. I mean, who ever publicly announces that they're starting a rival company in revenge for being kicked out?

I like (todays) Bill Gates as a human being. I like (the last current build of ) Steve Jobs purely because of his marketing skills.
Reportedly (I will edit once I find the source), a list of md5 hashes has been released. Just when you thought LinkedIn's Sha1 password hashing was a bad move...
I think Vooza's looking for their first technical hire, too!

I wonder if he'll be a rockstar ninja.
That doesn't make sense.

The point of blocking a link with robots.txt is to say "Hey, web crawlers, please don't load and index this page". it does not mean "Hey, users, please don't come and load and read this page".

So the script written, for all intents and purposes, is just the same as a regular old user clicking the link and reading the page then keeping a list of the links that work and those that don't. It's not a crawler, it's an automated user.

If you are a webmaster than wants to block people from posting links to your page all around the web allowing others to come and read it, make the page 403.
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: No. This is no knock on Heroku, either. No hosting solution can make that easy: it is an enterprise requirement which implies six figures of investment and a dedicated ops team with no newbies on it.
> maybe we should just order services from three different providers mirror our applications ourselves as a fail-over mechanism.

Yes, yes a thousand times yes. And dedicated servers don't cost much more than VPS's.
To use the vernacular, this story doesn't 'scan'.

The comment "It’s an open source encrypted, private alternative to other services such as Facebook chat." and then the comment from an alleged interrogator, “The interrogator (who claimed 22 years of computer experience) asked me which algorithms Cryptocat used and about its censorship resistance.” really set off some bells.

If it's open source, then git/svn/cvs pull a copy of the repo and read the code. No need to interrogate the guy. And second the DHS doesn't have any history of going after folks simply because they write some open source software.

Now could the guy be detained for other reasons? Sure. But this feels more like a troll to generate buzz for his app which seems to be on a few warez sites. My quick look at Github and Sourceforge didn't find it there.
Here is some data to back up this comment http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/facebooking/
Why? I'm not familiar with C# idioms, but it looks like a sane way to ensure that "items" and "expireOverride" are only modified by a single thread at a time.
I've been rather thoroughly questioned about just what exactly openbsd is and what it's good for and why I'd be silly enough to work on it for free just about every time I visit Canada. It's annoying, but doesn't feel nefarious. Maybe I should start blogging about so the Internet will throw me a pity party.
Says who? Not that I don't believe you.

EDIT: The developer who apparently implemented the password hashing replied to me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/russss/status/210783976879693824
He probably does. What I'm saying is, why would he put that to work cracking n PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-256 hashes per hour for n dollars per hour, when he could put it to work cracking >n MD5 hashes per hour for >n dollars?

If the answer is "my hashes protect something that is particularly valuable," then the attacker probably isn't going to hack your hash function, he's going to hack your secretary or your garbage disposal or something like that which is more effective.

Of course, in practice you should just use bcrypt anyway.
Case Study On Scaling PaaS Infrastructure
1 in 3 Facebook users spending less time on the site
If you really want quotes and things to be presented in the same formatting as the site, you might want to try Citational. It fills a different role than GimmieBar, in that it's meant for one-shot sharing instead of an archive. But it does let you highlight text or an image and show it in context: https://citational.com/v/5mf/15-learn-to-cook

(Yes, I built it... )
Best sarcastic comment from one of my co-founders: "Crap! They stole our idea"
5 nines is 5 minutes of downtime per year. 4 nines is 52 minutes of downtime per year.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_ca... for a handy chart and follow along with any of your favorite *aaS providers!
I'm using the word sustainable in the dictionary sense of the word rather than in the context in which it has become a rather vaguely defined buzzword.

We've(1) been harvesting crops off of the same ground every year for over 100 years. Thanks to technology the yields from the ground have increased every single year while the adjusted price of grain has dropped over the long term. Yes, we use fertilizer and diesel that are of course brought in from other areas as there is no other way to farm thousands of acres.

People that don't farm don't get how much we care about the land. It's not just some abstract cause temporarily adopted, it's what our father's father's passed to them and what we hope to pass to our sons and daughters. We want to use the smallest possible amount of fuel, fertilizers, and herb/pesticides because that stuff costs a lot of money and farming is a low margin operation (the last couple years notwithstanding). Technologies like Roundup-ready soybeans mean that we take fewer passes with a tractor over the same crop row, reducing the use of herb/pesticides and fuel, and dramatically reducing soil compaction.

(1) I make no income from farming, although I grew up working in the fields. I own a software company and I'm married into the family I'm referencing with the inclusive pronouns.
Or you can go for art, fun, raw passion, and a novel point-of-view.

There's an interesting take on this in the book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Videogame-Zinesters-Drop-outs-Hou...
Of course, like all satire, it wouldn't be so hilarious if it didn't strike uncomfortably close to home.
I will hire you. We are a bunch of awesome developers working with some of the best tech startups in the valley. Two of our developers are in India just like you and work remotely. Email and my company info are in my profile.
Yes, agreed - but the total number of APIs listed is a little over 6000, so it's a reasonable sample to some extent. There are a lot more APIs out there which aren't public / listed - so it's hard to account for those.
The closest open-source example I can think of is --verbose mode on many UNIX utilities, though that wasn't really what I had in mind. Developer Tools in Chrome is another example of the principle - think of how much easier it is to debug Chrome than IE6 - but again, not quite all the way. Imagine using Developer Tools to debug all of Chrome, eg. Webkit rendering (overlaid on the rendered page itself), resource parsing & scheduling, JS JIT compilation, etc, and not just the pages that execute within it. (Maybe this is possible, I'm not familiar enough with the Chrome project to know all the debug flags available.)
Huh? The flakiness of a standard uplink will have you down for 44 hours a year? On what planet? With our non-AWS hosting providers we tend to see 2-4 hours of network issues per year. Heroku's uptime also hasn't historically been anywhere near 99.97%. They were down for several days last year in The Great AWS Failure.
I think it's similar to http://isitchristmas.com/ . It's a simple answer that's always the same, to drive the point home: you are always the one responsible for your uptime, no matter whether you choose dedicated hosting, the cloud, your own closet, etc. You can't outsource responsibility.
It seems like the right thing, but it's not. By ignoring an important part of the spec, they put advertiser adoption of DNT in jeopardy. And it's not like it's for benevolent reasons; imagine how much they'd like Google to lose one of its core strengths.
Distributed Systems Tracing with Zipkin
Yes. I recommend having a look at either ProxMox (proxmox.com) which can simultaneously do OpenVZ and KVM; or, XCP for Xen-based stuff - see http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html
They forgot to talk about how their whole goal is to sell to Google for a billion dollars in 6 months.
The reason I like Justin's site (we don't know each other) is because you can tell it is:

a) personally curated
b) not updated too often (i.e. tried and tested products) and
c) supposed to be a definitive resource for someone who doesn't want to shop around & trusts his opinion

It might be an idea to avoid the generic or goofy items that make it look like your own personal Pinterest, and instead make it a site where your network of friends genuinely benefit from your personal experience of the items.
"Vooza needs money. That way we can go...international."

Brilliant.
Signed up. It looks like these guys really understand today's tech ecosystem.

/serious
Hm, I am split on that. I rarely tweet during talks, but I love the immediate backchannel. I usually forget about some points of the talk or I cannot find someone to talk to afterwards and the backchannel helps with that.

I learned that by force: on RubyKaigi 2009, there were IRC screens right next to the slides - mostly for translating the talks between english and japanese and vice versa, but also for commenting and all kinds of fun. So, depending on your language, you had to consume the IRC channel if you wanted to follow the talk. You could even read what was going on in another room. I enjoyed it a lot.

As a speaker, I am okay with it: I always spoke in front of tweeting crowds :).
Fair enough. The last time I was privy to this, it was more than a year ago. I didn't expect things to change that much :-).