skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also: quit the "security questions" thing. I can't count the number of times I've been locked out of my account because I couldn't remember the precise answer I gave to a security question.

I bought a house last month, and the biggest thorn in my side throughout all of the financial arrangements was security questions (I'm not even joking). Here's a Facebook status update I posted (I had already been complaining about security questions a bunch):

"Just got challenged with a security question, which was "Thank you for your loan application." Wtf, that is not a question. And I've never filled out any security questions for this website, so I have no idea what it's expecting me to enter.

"I swear, security questions are out to get me."
WOW. I was expecting something dumb but this is next level dumb. You're basically forcing a 7 character password since I already know one of them is one of those three special characters. Then you've just given me like 5 more rules that limit what the password can be.

Any password cracking service would crack this in hours. IT people should understand the basics about security before they are allowed to set policy.
I have pointed this out to people before too. It doesn't seem to deter their slavish adherence to what they declare to be "best practices", which seems to correspond to something they read in some magazine or blog.
He sent back a smiley face made from punctuation marks. Guess they're working on it.
"You are uncomfortable in demonstrating your knowledge in a practical way?"

Isn't that what his past projects and employment demonstrate?
But how do you know what's on your plate today with GTD? Usually the prescribed approach is to go into a context (ie, @email or @phone) and start plugging away at the next actions from various projects that require you to be in that context. Great if you're in a straitforward task job like sales but not good for creativity and getting creative work done. It's too rigid and the focus is on the granular next actionable step. Sometimes tough problems require 5 hours of focused going at it. Correct me if I'm wrong but GTD never worked for me to promote that kind of focus. (btw, I wrote the OP)
I use it almost every day, but in a very limited way and I can't say I really understand it I just have a feeling that it you could use it so much more
Www.adidaswingsde.com
Can you (or anyone with this problem) please send me a screenshot? hi@dustincurtis.com. Thanks.
If you had to create a list(or non-list) of requirements a password must pass what would it be? (Ex. Case sensitivity, length, cannot be the same as username etc etc) The bare minimum with the least frustration for the user? I was very surprised by the news-piece that blizzard was using case-insensitive passwords and that got me thinking...
WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release [1991]
Given the support and reaction of this post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053427) possibly a 'Show HN' tab at the top of the page might be a useful feature.
Of those ten rules, nearly half of them hurt password strength. The others make it harder for users to remember their passwords which will lead them to frustration and, ultimately, bad passwords.

Austin#1 is a perfectly valid password according to those rules. zxcvbn says it'd take 2.508 seconds to crack that.
The Future of Europe, by George Soros
Identity without a name
The thing that annoys me most about it is the "kudos" thing that animates on mouse-over. I've accidentally "given" kudos a couple of times before I figured out what it was so I could avoid it.
I think that one of the main "techniques" that humans use is continuous feedback - we don't decide exactly what path to use before we even start cutting, we just start cutting and see what happens and adjust as we proceed.
Oh the Places You'll Go is a superb children's book that takes apart difficult problems such as conformity, risk-taking, complacency and failure. It follows a young protagonist through a psychedelic landscape discussing the painful, confusing and wonderful places we will all eventually go -- if we just try. What could be better?
After coming up with a password that obeys all those rules, I recommend writing it down on a yellow sticky note and putting it on your monitor.
It sounds like intuitively you know what's important in the long-run and what interests you. However, the challenge occurs when you face a short-term hurdle that is required for your long-term goal but that short-term hurdle is something that you're not interested in. What do you do then?
Also sucks on iPad 3 (well, "new iPad") running 5.1.1.

When I manually drag the text pane over to the left (sigh), it overlaps the buttons transparently, then eventually redraws over them.
> a qualified scientist raised concerns very early on with the product being approved for human consumption.

He did not. I don't think you read that article very closely.

"It looks like pink slime. That is what I said." Asked if he and his family still eat hamburgers, Zirnstein sighed. "The labels aren't clear, so we don't eat it. That's the thing," he said. "It isn't freaking labeled."

He never said it wasn't fit for human consumption, because it was and is. He just thought it was gross. His issue, which is a reasonable criticism, is that the product was being sold as plain ground beef despite having undergone additional processing.

I'm sorry if my tone is very absolute, but that's because this is a very clear-cut, black and white issue. Ammonium hydroxide is a GRAS chemical which is harmless to put on meat and renders it safe for consumption. You may want to not eat overly-processed beef, and you may rightly argue you have a right to know, but any health or safety concerns are absolutely specious.
Why you suck at Getting Things Done
If you’re a creative type and interested in productivity, you might have tried David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. Supposedly, it works great. But for some reason, hackers, artists, and other creative don’t seem to gel with the process. Why doesn’t it work?

-	You don’t need GTD! David Allen designed this system for individuals who need to do 50 different tasks in any one day and are constantly interrupted by meetings and phone calls. If you know what you need to do and can work on it for multiple hours at a time, there’s no reason to spend extra energy on GTD.

-	You might not have worked with it long enough. For people I know, it’s taken at least a year to master the process of thinking analytically while you input tasks, and then switch to thinking intuitively when you choose which ones to do.

-	Most likely, you’re doing something wrong. Are you organizing tasks by context? Do you have a good reference system? Is your weekly review timely and consistent? Are all of your inboxes (including the one in your brain) at zero? GTD is almost all-or-nothing, and missing any one of these components could ruin your experience with the system.

There are plenty of jobs that can be done well without GTD. If you can manage without it, there’s probably no reason to make the switch.
How often do you go through the heap to prioritize the cards?
Yeah. As someone who prefers passwords in the 12-24 character length I get really annoyed when a site comes back and tells me my password isn't good enough because it doesn't follow various rules. Oh you really think someone is going to brute force $MILKAndDailyCheeseRe because it doesn't have a number in it?
To begin with, preventing SQL injection when passwords are stored in plain text without any escaping. (CHAR(8) field. No special characters allowed.)
The 'average' meaning does not depends on context but:

- on the distribution

- on whether by 'average' you mean 'mean' (in statistics, arithmetic mean) or 'median' (what value cuts the population in half)

The GP gives an example of people being above average by having two legs. I will take a similar example but in a classroom.

Say students in a classroom take a test scored from 0 (worst) to 20 (best). The result of the test is as follows: forty students get a 11 and ten gets a 1. That makes a mean of (11x40+10)/50 => 9. Hence all forty students are above average. If we plot the number of people per mark this gives a very special (and artificial) distribution since we made it up to make the point that it is possible for most people to be above average. In more realistic scenarios and unless skewed by external factors (bad test, wrong population, cheating) the distribution is often close to being normal, i.e mean and median are approximately the same (hence it's an impossibility to have 80% of people above mean).

Yet what's really interesting in Dunning-Kruger tests is not the actual results of the tests, it is the comparison between one's own assessment and real results, which actually abstracts from distribution problems and 'average' discussions, since each one person is compared to oneself. In the above whacky scenario we could have expected people getting a 1 to evaluate themselves scoring a 8.

If you don't want to read the whole paper, just look at the quartile/percentile graphs in the paper. They speak for themselves.
Instagram's Rival App Picplz To Be Shuttered In July
This may not have helped your specific case, but I recently bought 1Password, and updated all my security questions with randomly generated 16 character string answers, and just put those strings in the "notes" section of a website. So when they do challenge me I can just copy/paste them in. It's been awesome!
The poor should eat gruel and play with things they build out of discarded refuse, or they're not poor!

Seriously though, children are ridiculously expensive with their need to be entertained. If you're in the inner city then having your kids indoors playing video games is cheaper/safer/better for society than letting them roam the streets.

Even if you purchased all that stuff new it'd be around $1,500. Given 10 hours a day consumption (from the article) and a device lifespan of 3 years then the cost is around 10 cents/hour to keep your kid off the streets, off drugs and engaged in some kind of activity.

Compare to going to the movies (guessing at $10/hr), after-school clubs ($2/hr), summer camp ($1.50/hr), renting a DVD ($0.50/hr), smoking weed ($20/hr) or reading a book ($1/hr) then video games are one of the most cost effective ways for poor people to entertain children.
I've worked with rules like this, and it's even worse when it's some domain password used across multiple crappy systems. Often a 3rd party system that has integrated with this password doesn't accept the $, or has to be 7 characters or something. So the IT folks tell you to follow the rules, but if you use the accounting system, make sure not to put $ in there. #facepalm
That's an utterly horrible reason but I take the point.

I imagine many sites implementing these policies (some banks etc) are hashing their passwords properly and sanitizing SQL though!
OK as someone looking for employment, I feel ambivalent about this and probably would pull the plug on the process if you asked for non trivial work from me. I understand the need to weed out applicants that lack skills. This can and should be done by technical screening conducted by qualified individuals.

FWIW this opinion is based on experience. I've conducted more interviews than I have given. As an applicant I once went through a fairly lengthy interview process that first did a screening interviews including live coding exercises. They were conducted and critiqued in real time. I have no issue with these. You can either do what you say, or you can't and it becomes apparent fast.

The next stage is where I started to question the company's processes - They requested a small "project" followed by an interview. I _nearly_ pulled the plug on this, since it was a request for 10+ hours coding, but did it anyway.

The next interview involved a fairly in depth defense of my code and design choices, white board work that again put my skill set to the test real time. After several hours of this, I was requested to do another "small project" and I walked away.

TL;DR Ask me a million questions, put my skills to the test on the spot, but don't ask free work... I'll think you're unable to judge my skill/confused/a scammer or whatever.
Revised:

NYT: Ahem. LINKBAIT!!!!!114!234 Okay, now that I have your attention: "News!"

BB: facepalm You're really not helping.

NYT: Oh and PS, Pao's husband is TEH GAY!!!!

BB: Seriously?

NYT: Shut up I'm relevant.
170mph
I am sure operability and not security are the primary factors behind these rules.
Keeping passwords in plain text has nothing to do with not using prepared statements. There may be a correlation between the two types of stupidity, though.
Overall I'm a fan of GTD. I've found it's especially good for managing routine repetitive things that have cycle times of more than a month: remembering to get the oil changed, putting on/taking off snow tires on my car, planning my next vacation etc.

Also, the "capture now, process later" mindset is a great way of handling the emergence of random ideas and tasks on the fly, and asking myself "what is the next action?" when processing is great for getting clarity. I use this a lot in meetings - it forces everyone to get clarity on why we're there and what should happen next.

I've also found the "waiting for" and "someday/maybe" lists to be extremely really useful.
I disagree completely. Mastery necessarily implies a mastery of the basics, but it is so much more.

A master chef knows how flavors, textures, and colors interact to build a food experience much greater than the sum of its parts.

A master carpenter knows how the wood she is working with will behave as it is worked with and finished, so the joints and reinforcements are completely hidden within the aesthetics of the piece itself.

(I can't speak to accounting, but I would imagine there is a similar difference.)

The point being that, once the basics are mastered, there is a completely new level of complexity (and therefore creativity) that can be managed. The true masters are the ones who are one level above everybody else who is "merely" great.
Plus, you should never answer security questions honestly. Your favorite pet or the street you grew up on or your mother's maiden name are all not secret information. Many of my friends and family know the answers to all of these. So, when faced with a security question, I try to pick a random (but false) security answer, which I then write down in an encrypted file. This is a terrible solution, but it feels foolish to answer the questions honestly.
Not sure about the social value, but +1 for the motto.
Incredible Marco Photographs by Shikhei Goh
Infographics all SUCKS
Here's why they do not serve at all for SEO
But is GTD really suited to prioritizing your projects? It's mostly your current projects and then you get to work in contexts across various projects, which prevents you from focusing on one project for long periods of time.
"During my tenure in the music industry, my favorite part was getting to meet people that created truly Great music."
...

"What is fascinating to me is that Great creation stories all sound surprisingly similar. Something along the lines of “yeah we went in the studio and put down some tracks, and they sounded pretty good, and we had to redo a couple of things, and then when put out the album.”"

Do we have any info on the process that the people who didn't create "great" music used? Perhaps many of those used the same process. And what is the definition of "great" music anyway? Is it music that wins awards, or, the most popular music, or music that is critically acclaimed or music that is downloaded the most?
Wait, what?
This isn't a joke?
TV Business May Be Starting to Collapse
Amusing that the article considers all social media use as "time-wasting" and whatever undocumented things rich people do as non-timewasting.

The only conclusion from the study is that poor kids spend more time online, the whole "digital divide"/"time wasting" thing is dubious editorial spin.
Security questions are usually just used to decide whether to send you an email with a password reset link (or more annoyingly, a new password), aren't they? I've never seen a system where being able to answer the security question(s) is equivalent to knowing your password. Anyone who knows my mother's maiden name probably also knows my email address and could more easily spam me directly than using a website to send me password reset links.
I wouldn't, I would apply something like this http://www.passwordmeter.com/ and show the user how secure or insecure their password is. Depending on the service they are using maybe only allow passwords at Strong or better but base that off the complexity of the passwords. %09(0m is stronger than minneapolisminnesota
This is by far my favorite children's book; I read it to my son at least once a week. After our first reading, I immediately realized how relevant its message is to entrepreneurs, so I'm glad to see it show up on Hacker News. One more blog post I should have written only to see someone else beat me to it. =)

Its basic message is to embrace failure. You're going to fail, things will be difficult, and you probably won't be great at everything. All of that should absolutely not deter you from trying what you want and living the life you want to live.
The NFC Eastern Division Still the Toughest Kids on the Block
Things to Do and People to Meet, in 2 Hours and 2 Miles. http://2x2app.com/
First, I go through a light language overview: fundamental concepts and syntax. This gives me a feel language, whether or not I want to pursue it (I keep revisiting and abandoning Clojure), and what I can learn from it and apply to other development in other programming languages I already know. For example, playing with programming languages with functional influences (Python, Scala) has influenced how I write Java code in my day job (more static functions, object composition over class inheritance, more re-use) even if I rarely touch those influential languages. For examples of a light overview, take a look at anything on w3schools.com or take a look at http://tour.golang.org which I read recently. I've taken notes before and it seems to provide very little value, especially if you have access to the light overview again.

Then you must build something to exercise that learning. If you just read and don't build, it'll slip away just as quick as it came. Solving an actual problem that you have is a good motivator for building something. Recreating something as you believe it should be is another one; for example, build your ideal word processor. Complete learning involves building things of significant complexity.

I would learn complementary languages to diversify skills. If you know C#.NET, time spent also learning Java is not necessarily that beneficial. They are similar. However, learning Bash for shell programming is at a different level of abstraction and is optimal for tasks that the aforementioned languages are not.
>"when an athlete is interviewed and says things like “well, we just went out there to play today, and we got some good momentum and powered through the other team,” it's not that the athlete is a moron lacking the cognitive capacity to accurately explain to us what happened out on the field that day. Rather, it's that these interviews really, truly are an accurate description of what was going on in their head during the game."

There's a bit of a switch from a last shot question to a "what do you think of your team" question. Intelligent thoughtful and specific answers to questions about specific plays are quite common (e.g. Tiger Woods discussing his shots after a match).

What is common is that athletes may be less articulate than your typical office professional when describing those events. This interview with Wayne Rooney regarding his goal of the year hits some of the issues: http://espnfc.com/us/en/news/1071240/beautiful-game-beautifu...

BTW, the best Dr Seuss book is "One Fish, Two Fish."
Doesn't the strength of a password also depend on the cardinality of the underlying alphabet? So your example makes only sense when you also say something about the used alphabet or am I missing something here?
You could also sell your house. If you skip a payment or two, the bank will probably start begging you to do a shortsale. In which case you rent for a year or two to fix your credit, and then buy another place.
+1 and Agree. It's wrong to get free work.
However, just out of curiosity how would you have felt if the employer has actually paid you for those "small projects"? (To be clear: No guarantee that you will get the Job, but payment is guaranteed for the hours you put in)
No. Past projects are typically not solo projects, so it's hard to establish who did what. We're hiring a developer for what he can do, not for what other people in his team did.
"Similarly, in software, you can't be thinking about which programming language you are using, and whether you are using MongoDB or MySQL, or whether photogrid layouts are the hot new thing or not. You will never hit the proverbial fastball if that is the sort of junk filling your head. Rather, creating and shipping products needs to be muscle memory. You just need to have clear eyes, a full heart, and be ready to show up and play."

Muscle memory comes from doing something many times. Watch the new barristas at Starbucks and compare how they use their hands to vs experienced barristas. Or a plumber. Or a physician. Or a programmer.

It takes time. Unless I am understanding what the OP is saying he seems to be implying that you can "just do it" and be in the zone that allows you to avoid thinking about "which programming language you are using".

When someone asks me a question about something that I have years of experience in I have all the answers immediately without thinking and I know the questions to ask and the nuances and can even correct the wrong information being given to me. That took years reading, learning and experiencing things. It doesn't come overnight. Along the way the learning process did involve "junk filling" my head.
I'm using both on Tindie.com (an Etsy for homemade tech) and love them. I looked at the other Django ecommerce platforms, and they are honestly no where near Cartridge/Mezzanine interms of usability and ease for the administrator. Satchmo is the best known Django ecommerce platform. It has a lot more functionality out of the box (shipping & payment modules come already integrated), however apart from that, it is a headache.

If you are looking for something that has the basics down (cart, product details, customizable payment system), Cartridge and Mezzanine are the way to go IMO
As for the CL executable: this[1] answer on SO contains pointers to the executable making mechanisms for the most common open source CL implementations.

I agree completely that one of the bigger problems with Common Lisp might be that there is not much information readily available how to structure bigger projects. In general I find the projects of Edi Weitz a good read [2].

And so: I applaud your effort ... !

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/31332
[2] https://github.com/edicl/
> You're basically forcing a 7 character password since I already know one of them is one of those three special characters.

Not exactly, because you don't know where the special character is. If the allowed characters are k, the number of 8-character passwords would be k^8. With this rule, even assuming that only one special character is used the number becomes 7^k * (3 * 8) = 7^k * 24, so if k ~= 60 the entropy is reduced by roughly 1 bit.

Still, it is an incredibly stupid rule.
I've never been on the other(interviewer) side of the hiring process and I was on another side only once during the last decade, so I might not have enough insight, but I really don't understand non-coding coders filtering per se, be it your method or FizzBuzz...
When someone says about their years of experience in coding in their CV, is it a common case that they're lying?