skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way forward for nontechnical users seems clear: avoid giving websites sensitive information and letting them store it for you. How long before Facebook is hacked?

Keep sensitive information on your own storage media, not on some website's servers connected to the internet.
www.duz.in 免费主机
Is this newfound outpouring of confirmed hacks a result of the market becoming more blasé about leaked passwords, or is this just a statistical anomale?
The New Facebook Monetization Strategy (paying to be seen/announcements)
So I saw something new on my facebook today... announcements. The first one was free, after that they ask $1.40 to "announce" a post (marking it as important for all my friends to "make sure friends see this").

Has anyone else seen this? http://imgur.com/a/ZJAuy (Screenshots anonymized using Social Fixer)

The grand facebook exodus is nigh.
E la Carte (Palo Alto, CA) - Front End Engineer (local - FT or contract), User Interface Graphic Designer (local - FT or contract), & National Account Executive (local FT)

E la Carte's Presto touch-screen tablets increase restaurant efficiency and profitability, as well as guest interaction by enabling guests to browse appetizing pictures of the entire menu, place orders, split checks, make payments, and play interactive games – all from the comfort of their restaurant seats without having to wait!

We're backed by Y-Comb, SV Angel, & Lightbank (Groupon). Small tight-knit team working out of a house in downtown Palo Alto.

For details on the jobs, go to www.elacarte.com/about
Personally, I have found clipboard (http://clipboard.com) to be far better for saving things from around the web.

Their bookmarklet lets you clip an arbitrary region of a webpage, AND IT ACTUALLY PRESERVES THE DOM OF THAT REGION. That's right, it's not a screenshot. The dom of what you clipped is preserved, searchable, selectable, styleable, the works.

I have found that I can visually retrieve the clipping by quickly scanning my entire clipping collection in one scroll. It's nuts.

No, I do not work for clipboard, but I do use it for all of the following:
- Saving solid guitar tabs that I've found around the web.
- Bookmarking photoshop and illustrator tutorials, using the best graphic from the tutorial as the clipping
- Recipes, which usually consist of text and images
- Random awesome images
- Slideshare presentations (which can actually be watched from within the clipping

They're bookmarklet is totally magic sauce. You gotta try it out.
I think if you care enough about password security to know these appliances exist, you already know how to use a proper password storage scheme. The ones that we are seeing dumped were not even trying.
E la Carte (Palo Alto, CA) - Front End Engineer (local - FT or freelance) & User Interface Graphic Designer (local - FT or freelance)

E la Carte's Presto touch-screen tablets increase restaurant efficiency and profitability, as well as guest interaction by enabling guests to browse appetizing pictures of the entire menu, place orders, split checks, make payments, and play interactive games – all from the comfort of their restaurant seats without having to wait!

We're backed by Y-Comb, SV Angel, & Lightbank (Groupon). Small tight-knit team working out of a house in downtown Palo Alto.

For details on the jobs, go to www.elacarte.com/about
Show HN: Mini Meme Generator (using photos from recent Lenovo campaign)
The Verge is a news site like Demand Media is Wikipedia.
exceptionhub.com is also good and gives nice stack traces.
Eclipse? Transit of Venus?*

* (I know, I know: Wrong crowd. But take it as a tongue in cheek way of saying that it could be a "trend" with another explanation than either of the two you posit.)
This makes for a heartwarming magazine article but I don't think it's good advice.

If you don't set boundaries with your clients, they will set them for you. Which means calling the CEO at 2 AM on a Saturday.

The sentiment of always respecting your clients is a good one, but allowing yourself to get roped in on issues that you shouldn't is a surefire path to burnout and losing money.
Wow that's incredible! Ground breaking mathematics and cryptography techniques, sounds so interesting. I would love to understand it all.
Small companies can afford to do this much better than big ones, since they're often doing it in house. "White Glove" customer support is one of the few things you can do to beat the big guys when you're first starting out.

Joel said it best: Remarkable Customer Service, as in service so good that people actually remark about it.

http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
But Che Guevara makes a better T-shirt
I wouldn't down-vote your comment.

During my interview with that team, one of the kids proudly took credit for the span tag. A weekend hack. Committed the code and shipped it. No review. SOP.

Being more standards-minded at the time, I wanted to throttle the kid.

With the benefit of hindsight, I see that all the jitter and experimentation was pretty much ideal. If a feature proves useful, other browsers may adopt it, and it may become a de facto standard.
TechCrunch ran a story about how funny these photos were and how they should be captioned.

We thought it would be cool to actually do it.

Original article:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/07/the-only-logical-thing-to-d...
It would be awesome to see an update to each of the graphs in that presentation. Does anyone know if that exists?
How is he a bullshitter? He created Populous, Syndicate and Dungeon Keeper (and Magic Carpet!) - A pretty good record for a bullshitter. The guy is a legend.

Some of his ideas failed. So what. At least he tried.

What do we have now? Oh yeah, the latest Call of Duty shooter with absolutely horrible plot twists and dialogue. Yeah, a pool of true innovation.

I think Rogert Ebert had it right. Gaming is awfully trite. For every Shadow of Memories and Grim Fandango you have 1'000'000 rotten ideas.
Failover across geographically distributed datacenters is a challenge that doesn't get talked about all that much.

As a small company you probably aren't able to easily get your own IP block allocated (that I know of) so BGP [0] isn't really an option and the best you can do is probably DNS switching. Use a good DNS provider and set your TTLs to something low like 30 seconds or 1 minute. Then when you have an outage, change the DNS entry to point to a secondary datacenter, which would have a static error page or a reduced-functionality site. There seems to be some debate around whether low DNS TTLs increase users' request times, but we haven't seen it.

There are some companies that will handle the monitoring and switchover for you (Dyn comes to mind) but we prefer to manually switchover for the time being. We have a Big Red Button sinatra app that reports the status of the site and allows you to fail over to the secondary and recover when the primary returns; I'm planning on open sourcing it once it gets some documentation.

I think the reason failover doesn't get talked about as much in the startup world is just because it's hard to do and the costs are disproportionately high for a small company unless availability is really critical to you. For most people, just using multiple availability zones on EC2 is probably sufficient.

[0] http://ajohnstone.com/achives/high-availability-across-multi...
Slate was one of the high profile OnSwipe adopters and they dropped it recently. It's only a matter of time before all website owners see the reduced traffic from tablets because of how terrible OnSwipe is and it dies the slow painful death it deserves.

Oh, and don't bother trying to get an answer out of them as to why their product is so terrible, crash prone and memory hungry. I've tried every possible forum, they won't respond to anything other than blind praise. What the hell is the point of participating in every form of social media known to man if you won't actually answer questions or help people with those accounts?
I tried to test this out but even on localhost it kept throwing:

status: "That domain isn't registered..."

And I don't really feel like paying $10 to TEST if the tool really works, let alone if I want to use it. Working demo please.
Is it safe to let websites store personal information for you. Why not store the information on your own storage media that you control with your own hands? How long before Facebook is hacked? Would they even tell us about it when it happens? The websites have not proven they can safeguard personal information. Why should we keep giving it to them?
Just got out of the first half of the Meet Azure prezo. Pretty slick integration of PaaS and IaaS. Git, Linux, Node.js, MongoDB, but also .Net, Team Foundation Server (ok, I had to look up TFS) and RDC. Has SQL Server as a managed service. Website hosting also: Wordpress, Drupal, etc. Caching (memcache-compliant) and Blob storage. Lots o' data centers. Identity management.... yeah Active Directory. They have multi-tentant (lower $) and reserved VMs (more $ and perf, tho not clear if everything runs exactly like on reserved VMs). Sounds like they've been hard at work. It'll be interesting to see how it works outside of a scripted demo. http://meetnodejs.azurewebsites.net/ is the node.js and mongodb demo they ran. Still seems to be up.
I would posit that the much bigger gamble is taking a casual view of your obligations to customers. Word of mouth is a potent thing. A company that values chasing new dollars over taking care of existing customers isn't going to enjoy a good reputation. Moreover – customer support issues, properly handled, are a crucial window into your product's performance, reliability and usability.

Every interaction you have with a customer impacts your brand. Sometimes you win the lottery. Other times you don't. But I'd much rather err on the side of giving a fuck. Anything less is revolting to me, both as a customer and as someone whose bills are paid by the existence of customers.

If you sell something, the customers are your job.
He's already rich.
The Problem with Using Hours for Estimates
MITx's "Circuits and Electronics" class might be a nice place to start.
Are we ever going to be able to actually buy this?
Depends on what kind of clients do you have.
If you have individual clients then yeah, it may be a waste of time sometime.
But if you have institutional clients (other companies), like this startup had (broadcast stations), then I think it's worth going the extra mile.
Well said.

There may be companies/products/sites (say Facebook) where responding to every customer gripe is not feasibly addressable (or even valid). However, most of the world works in terms of products and services. You want to delight and provide your customers with the help you can (and more often than not, it will pay off).

In terms of scale, take Apple while Steve Jobs was active. For every amusing one liner email that made it into the blogs/news, I suspect there was many more that were contacted by executive customer support for assistance. Was it Steve responding to each and every person? No, but he did care about quality and there were multiple situations where a letter about an unusual circumstance resulted in customers getting good service.

The market around products like the one in the article are generally tight, most people know each other, etc. In this case, the founder/ceo was able (and committed) to handling the situation. In bigger market opportunities, an organization with a good support staff will likely attract more business over time than one without.
The original case you dismiss (Schmeiser) is acknowledged by both sides that the field was contaminated by passing trucks. Both he and the company have said he bought no seed from Monsanto. The court ruling said it didn't matter what he did after that (knowingly or unknowingly) since he was a person who reused seed which is how it has been done forever until Monsanto.

The reason they are after all the record on page 2 of the article is they are taking anyone who had seed cleaning done - even if they are not their customers. Its real easy to prove their seed mixed since even Monsanto admits that pollen-flow is inevitable (Monsanto's 2005 Technology Agreement).

Google Tom Wiley who is a ND farmer. He has some interesting experiences in the contamination area.
I would, but only as an unpaid intern. Dealing with payments to India is too hard for a fledgling startup. Maybe you'll find a more established company to pay...but as a Python/Haskell hacker I could at least offer you intellectually stimulating work :).
"No matter what actually happened, you should've been prepared."

This is just plain false. Being prepared comes at a cost. If you over-prepare, then your customers have to pay more for no good reason, and they don't necessarily want to. You have to draw a line and make a judgement call.

There are such things as natural (or political) disasters so serious that it would be extremely stupid to plan for them. And there are other disasters in between this and run of the mill. Again, it's a judgement call. And it's not your "fault" if the customer wants a combination of low price and reliability, and you made a reasonable tradeoff in order to achieve it.
How many services use ldap with per-user controlled access, kerberos or radius for authenticating their users? Yeah... If we're not using what's available now, why would people start using specific appliances?

I know the list here has a wide range of possibilities and doesn't map exactly to what you describe. What I mean is that we can do things 10 times better than we do them now with off-the-shelf (or even, off-the-github) products right now. Yet there's still a lot of services authenticating by `SELECT ... WHERE user='" + $user + "' AND pass='" + $pass + "'`.
Am I the only one who doesn't see any problem with this at all?

I mean, it's not like attendees are talking into a phone, inconveniencing other people. Complaining that every attendee's attention is not permanently fixed upon you strikes me as particularly vain. What about taking notes on a laptop? What about scribbling into a notebook? You should be glad that someone's interested enough to repeat the things you're saying to others.

Backchannel tweeting to me sounds like an excellent solution to the whispered conversation. Now you don't need to be physically proximate to someone in order to discuss ideas raised during the presentation. Not only that, but you're not going to disturb other attendees doing it! Thanks to this tech, people can add richness to the presentation they are attending.

This leads into the future. What happens when we have implants that allow us to communicate without tapping on a device at all, but rather just by thinking? How are you going to even know who's fully fixated upon you, and not engaged in backchannel conversation? And would you still be offended?

Always remember: Presentations are not for you; they are for your audience.
The solution is either to have a PaaS provider who ruthlessly eliminates single points of failure (there isn't one, currently)

This isn't possible by definition, right? The PaaS provider itself becomes the single point of failure.

Rings a bit like a "Who created God?" argument. "What single entity can I use to defend against failures by a single entity?"
Nice hack.

Of course reverse dns doesn't work :-) I suppose it kinda sorta could if you tracked where a request came from and what IP you sent it and if you got a reverse lookup you could undo that, but still it is clever!
Did you set the API key? You should be able to test on localhost with a free account. I'm happy to help over email if you like (ethan@proxino.com).
Hmmm. Didn't this launch like a year ago? I remember emailing them about some questions I had a couple times and never got a reply, I assumed they shut down. Too bad since during this time a few competitors have come up: Sentry, ExceptionHub, etc
Researching To Build a Rapid Prototyping Tool
how does this experiment have any relation to reality?

i think you're implying that this farmer happened upon an entire field of crops that he did not plant, then determined that this field was seeded using roundup-ready seeds, and then sprayed roundup on that field.

do you really think that the entire field was planted by the wind? do you think that this guy left his fields fallow and then the wind just seeded the entire thing? or that he planted his own seeds, but then the wind blew in enough seeds to displace enough of his crop that he could spray it with roundup and still have enough crop left for a good yield?
I hope people trust 37signals.
Hmm... Why wouldn't I just type the IP in?
I appreciate this kind of trip and culture is not for everyone.

But I worry about the stereotype you project - we're not all 20-somethings, and I think even our 20-somethings would object to you thinking they had anything like "free schedules"!

I totally agree with your comment that anything like this needs to be done with regard to the people and personalities on your team.
It's also the timing. The assumption is that since this is a novel attack and apparently not based on Marc Stevens' attack which was published in 2009, that it therefore was likely developed prior to 2009.
There are some very big numbers for the oldest and most classic video games as well. Take a look at the estimated numbers for Super Mario Brothers. Or the entire Mario franchise.
How about this for security MD5(SaltFromDB + Password + ApplicationConstantSalt)? How would that be affected by something like this? Given the user you'd their salt, their paassword but not the application salt. Still really insecure?
Because then you can only serve one site from that address.

With this you could serve as many different sites as you want based on the first part of the domain name.
> Windows 8 won't even run Silverlight.

They don't want their tablet users to use Netflix?
Well, if you don't :
https://github.com/sstephenson/xipd
It is their fault. The company could have used global load balancing with the app hosted in multiple geographically distributed data centers in multiple national jurisdictions through multiple independent providers. This would ensure that the earthquake which leveled Amazon's California data center and the flood which took out Hetzner's data center in Germany and the martial law declaration which took out Linode's Japanese data center and the bankruptcy which closed down Rackspace's Amsterdam data center has no operational impact on Peer1's data center in New York where the service continues uninterrupted. As the data is fully synchronized between all data centers, the company keeps running, all customers are online, and the company can work on setting up additional redundancy in a Canadian data center to make up for the others which were lost.

Yes, this costs money. It's why people accustomed to getting everything for free on the internet can't fathom why larger companies charge six or seven figures for a service that they could roll out themselves by installing an open source package on some Linode VM. If you're paying that kind of money for the reliability, it's because you're extending a promise to your end customers, and the service contract you receive from your provider should come with lots of guarantees and financial penalties if the conditions warranting the price tag aren't met.
Ah, for virtual hosts, got it. Thanks.
looks very useful
OK, let's get started

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/BrowserID/Quick_Setup

http://openid.net/developers/

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/sign-twitter
This is a new product (made by one of the same people) with the same (old) name. It does have some functionality in common with the old product.
Is Social Media the New Bubble?
you're missing the point

what OP is complaining about is that when Heroku has an outage it says that there's an error within the client's application. I agree that it's the client's responsibility to have an up-and-running app, while the average user doesn't really care what's going on behind the scene, in this case Heroku is still giving out factually wrong and misleading information.

I can imagine users will oftentimes tell Heroku's clients to fix their app when in reality there's nothing they can do.
How does this compare with http://errorception.com/ ?
Is there a mailing list for jetpants so we can ask questions? For example how should my application connect to mysql? Should it connect directly to mysql or to a jetpants server and how?
While I thoroughly enjoy the heartwarming part, I don't think that's why it's good advice from a business perspective.

It's great advice because word of mouth is extremely important for a technical business selling to a small but lucrative market where buyers have alternatives (like hiring decisions). This will have less impact in large consumer sales where advertising matters, or when you have a market cornered.

It will work when you apply for a job or hire someone. You're selling to a small market - the few employers you speak with. They have some alternatives, but if someone they know and trust (Bob, in this story) raves about you from first-hand experience, it matters quite a lot. Likewise if someone tells me how awesome it is to work with a particular person or group, I am much more likely to take that job among competitive alternatives. Treat your employees like crap and all you'll get are crap new employees, etc.

We don't all run businesses in small lucrative markets. But we do all apply to jobs from time to time, where previously helped or pissed off people will make a huge difference.
False dichotomy there - there are plenty of innovative new IPs out there, not to mention that Molyneux also fell into the sequel trap in the end. I think it's fair to say that in recent times he has failed to deliver more than he has delivered.
KDE Software Compilation 4.8.4 Released
> Well I guess Microsoft could have done it but...

"Why is IE faster? It cheats!"
http://www.mail-archive.com/foib@ianbell.com/msg00031.html
Don't forget Ben Chandler. He's one of my favourites.
> On the 4 major carriers in the U.S., we don’t have the luxury of a rational system like some carriers in other parts of the world, where only the sender pays for the text.

Someone, please explain the rationale behind this to me! It's such a strange concept to me. How does this make sense? How do people actually put up with _paying_ to receive SMS and voice calls?
I'm not going to trust these companies again, I closed my accounts with last.fm and linkedin, you get one shot with my data.
To expand on this, this problem can usually be solved by editing /etc/hosts. But you can't do that on some platforms such as iOS.

By the way, a neat trick is to assign an alias to your network interface in order to avoid the trouble of DHCP giving you a different IP address each time you connect. For example, on Mac OS X:

$ sudo ifconfig en1 alias 10.99.99.99 netmask 255.0.0.0

This address will only be reachable from hosts that have a route to it, which can be achieved for example by also giving them an alias on the same subnet. Still, comes in handy at times.

(Obviously you want to be sure you're using a vacant address.)

(And of course, when you have control over the DHCP server there are more elegant ways of achieving this, such as binding your MAC to a static IP address.)

Edited for clarity.