skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although I find it as funny as everyone else, I also think there's a cautionary tale in there, somewhere.

A little over a year ago I did a few months of contracting for a company that was exactly like Vooza: buzzwords-galore, moving goalposts every month, no revenue model to speak of besides borrowing more money from investors... a complete and utter disaster.

I don't know where those guys are nowadays, and I truly don't care, but to me as a developer those months were a massive waste of time and energy drain.

So the lesson to learn is: before you agree to work for anyone, no matter how much money/equity they promise you "when VC money comes in" do your due diligence, a critical assessment of the company and ask the hard questions before committing to anything. You'll thank me later.
Their event listings used to be my go-to place to find out about concerts. The problem is they have a bug they've never fixed (after at least 2 years) where you can't see events happening on the current night. I think it's related to timezone, and the fact they are based in the UK.

Now I've got songkick, which kicks ass at keeping me informed about shows. But the whole reason songkick is so effective for me is that I imported my listening history from last.fm when I first signed up.
I was seriously considering trying something like this with either the Raspberry Pi or the APC <http://apc.io/>.

It looks like one PandaBoard can roughly match the CPU horsepower of four APC boards at a slightly lower price, so that's good to know. The Raspberry Pi might still beat out the PandaBoard in terms of purchase cost-to-Megahertz ratio. We'll see. :-)
To be 'fair': when Last.fm first launched, md5 was probably 'state of the art'. I mean take a step back, they have been around for like forever.

The question is: How would you go on about moving your user database from md5 to a more advanced algorithm? Validate a user's password on log-in and then encrypt it with the new, more secure algorithm?
I personally like XAML. What part of it do you think was a let down?
Personally I've always found XAML and C# to be an incredibly productive programming environment. I wish I could work with the MS tool chain more often.
You can even take advantage of it at some kinds of talks. If you assume some percentage of your audience has a device with internet access, give them some online supplementary material, or demo, or interactive data, or something similar to accompany your talk. There's a lot of nice stuff you can do on the web that's better than powerpoint slides.

I also tend to find that, at academic conferences, better questions come from people who're following along with the accompanying paper during the talk.
You're right that you should keep practicing engineering, but you can also deliberately practice your social skills: public speaking, networking, coordinating groups, recruiting, etc. I suggest volunteering for a local non-profit. You can help them with their software needs and also help recruit and lead volunteers. Taking responsibility in a small non-profit is much like running a start-up.
The idea that my customizations would make it appreciably more secure (especially vs. just slightly increasing the work factor) seems questionable to me. On the other hand, it's very plausible that my customizations could accidentally make it less secure. Way smarter folks than me have messed up algorithms they actually put a lot of thought into — I'm not going to go blithely turning knobs in good algorithms and hope their positions weren't important.

Incidentally, what kind of drive-by attack are you thinking? Like, you have your password database sitting out in the open and there are bots crawling the web trying mechanically to crack it? Because that doesn't sound like a common case, but I'm not sure what else you could mean.
Actually no, we lost them because of bizarre copyright rules which meant they had to be deleted.
Look at the bill of materials teardowns for recent Android phones. Many of them are around just $200 in parts, with many of those parts unnecessary in this larger form-factor: $40-80 in radio parts for voice/3G/4G, the touchscreen tech, gyroscopes and other sensors, front and rear cameras, and having to pack it all onto a much smaller board.
I thought we were over thinking about file sizes on the disk. You should look at the gzip size.
Salts aren't meant to be secret (or rather, no more secret than the password hashes themselves). The goal is to prevent a precomputed brute force attack.

If you store straight unsalted hashes, you can precompute the hash for every likely password, store the precomputed hash -> password mappings in a nice efficient data structure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table) and use the same precomputed tables to reverse every hash in the system with a very fast lookup. And every other system using the same unsalted hash scheme.

If you have a salt, this doesn't work -- you'd need a set of precomputed tables for each salt value, which rather defeats the object of precomputation.

If you take it a step further, and use a storage scheme like bcrypt or PBKDF2, not only are you protected from the precomputation attacks, but testing each password candidate takes much longer than a straight cryptographic hash -- so brute force attacks becomes much slower, too.
i actually like xaml. can i ask what parts of it makes xaml let down?
I think that Twitter has absorbed some of the long tail - it's pretty easy to use a twitter account as a proxy for read and write commands for a low scale device or web site, of course you can't make it a chargeable interaction!
Uh, what? They don't feel entitled. They're doing what they want and making money. It's those who say "well I'm just taking it then" that are being "entitled".
You mentioned doing this because you have projects that you think need funding? 2 questions: 1) how much do you need? 2) with your chops/age a crowdfuned solution might work for you.

I think plenty of devs on here would be willing to toss you a few $$$ for a well defined project.
I'm not sure your question makes sense. People following an event over Twitter can easily multi-task; they can just scan every few minutes or less frequently as desired. Following the same event with video requires lots more bandwidth (more awkward when mobile), attention, noise (or headphones), screen real estate, etc. Unless you're extremely interested in the event, watching live video is usually a big waste of time.
No, I'm assuming Cable has in their contract that HBO isn't allowed to do this for a reason.
Chosen doesn't support adding tags dynamically. It also looks like select2's api is more friendly and convenient. I will be converting my chosen dialog to select2 as it looks like an improvement overall.
The Tale of the $340 CPM
Disney Sprinkles Magic Over Healthy Living and Media
Are you really trying to argue that the Amazon app store offers a comparison to the iOS app store? Do you have numbers for the performance on Google Play?
Good. Maybe then I can have my music player/library that's just a player/library, like the original iTunes.
What's always fascinated me about this "universal love" that services like Rdio and Spotify are receiving is what an incredible dichotomy that is with the first generation of streaming music services (the "paid" Napster, MusicMatch, etc). Those services were almost as universally reviled as Spotify is currently lauded.

The truly unfortunate thing, for my listening habits at least, is that finding what I want on Spotify is always a crap shoot. They may have it and they may not. What I end up doing at the moment is paying $10 / mo for Spotify premium (primarily because I hate their ads and genuinely prefer the higher audio quality on my home stereo system). and end up supplementing with another $10 / mo in iTunes bills to buy the songs that aren't available on Spotify.

While I do enjoy the "instant gratification" of Spotify and the ability to get an "all-in-one" package, people's expectations and habits around music consumption are fundamentally different than other forms of media in that music is primarily a passive experience with reading or watching television / film content are both very active experiences. I don't think a precipitous drop-off is coming to the downloading world until those habits change--or until Spotify and it's ilk can cater to them (e.g. full library available offline easily, larger catalogue coverage, etc.)
No, you can only call yourself a professional programmer if you've worked as one. When you successfully program a computer, even if it's just:

10 PRINT "COCKS"

20 GOTO 10

-- you are a programmer.
I couldn't get to step 3 on the trial signup. I think we just DDoS'ed Azure.

"The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable."
The following metaphors are more or less accurate and helped me with the same transition (MVC web architecture to Android):

* Layouts are like views, though Android's XML layouts aren't able to have conditionals or logic like most web app templates

* Intents are like URLs, the Manifest file is like the router

* Activities are like controllers, you should aim to keep them "thin". This is also where callbacks for things like button clicks live

* You can use sqlite on Android, but there isn't anything like the Django ORM built-in

* SharedPreferences can act as a key-value store for small data (sort of like Redis I suppose)

If you can expose all of your app's functionality through an API, then you can just treat the Android app as an API client. If not (or if you want the app to be more than a wrapper), I would aim for the prototypical "thin controller, fat model" pattern and push all the business logic into plain Java objects if possible (so much easier to unit test).
Drama continues, last.fm reveals that some user passwords leaked today
Good job — you validated your idea, hustled, and launched. Most people don't get to accomplish this. I wish you the best of luck.

Planning on doing an AdWords or targeted Facebook campaign?
Have you ever seen tagging done differently? It is the most compact and efficient way to add/delete tags.
I did a presentation a few weeks ago and I found that it was awesome as a presenter to know what people think, and how they perceived my talk : I looked at hashtag after the talk.

I'm a total noobs at talking in public but that was very useful for me. It also made very easy to talk with people who expressed their interest or disinterest.
A One Page Guide to Testing Mobile Apps / Sites
OS X doesn't run on ARM at all. iOS might, with a ton of hacking, but as far as I'm aware that hasn't been demonstrated by anyone yet.
This increases the likely-hood that flame is state sponsored. It still seems surprising that in the wild malware would use a novel crypto result. The risk of publicly releasing the technique is fairly high. Perhaps with md5 being phased out, the technique was losing value quickly regardless. If info warfare becomes more widespread I wonder if mining malware for crypto analysis results could be a valuable research technique.
Talk to your state's labor board. They'll want to help you since an unpaid paycheck also means unpaid payroll taxes.
Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists
https://github.com/kaepora/cryptocat

That's the second Google search result for Cryptocat.
Assuming the check is more than a couple hundred bucks, hire an attorney for $100 to $200 to send a demand letter for the paycheck plus your attorney costs to date. (Don't let the attorney do a lot of 'research' make it clear that initially you just want a demand letter. This establishes that the expense goes up the longer they delay. Or, file a small claims action.
We've done this twice so far at Sincerely. Once to Puerto Vallarta Mexico when our team was ~7 people. And once to Tahoe for a ski-cation when we were at ~9 people. Both were week-long trips and cost under $1k per person. We are doing Mexico again soon with our team of 14.

Quick thoughts:
- We like to ship stuff while on these trips. I find it unproductive to do brainstorming or planning on these trips. We plan before we go. We execute while we are away. And on drunken walks home from the club or sunburned strolls back from the beach, we come up with great ideas that we quickly turn into new realities for our users.
- The trips end up defining elements of company culture. It has been on these trips where we've started our board game culture, our exercise culture, etc
- For several of our employees, this was the first time they had left the country. Most of us do startups because they are challenging and an amazing learning environment. It is nice to extend that learning experience into other aspects of our human experience - like traveling abroad.
- I always dreamed about working at a company that did cool things like workcations to Mexico. And the best thing about running your own startup is that you can actually redefine the traditional work place. Be the change you want to see in the world. It feels really really good.
On early adopter planet? Which you can say is the "3-5 years in the future" planet? ;-)
Yes, that's exactly what you do. In Django 1.4 (the latest), they store passwords using PDKDF2 or bcrypt. The nice thing is that it automatically upgrades the hash function if it used to be something else:

_______

Password upgrading

When users log in, if their passwords are stored with anything other than the preferred algorithm, Django will automatically upgrade the algorithm to the preferred one. This means that old installs of Django will get automatically more secure as users log in, and it also means that you can switch to new (and better) storage algorithms as they get invented.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#password-...

_________

So it would be trivial for the big sites to have switched transparently to a safer hash, even if MD5 was Ok when they started. You could also add salts in the same way, if you were storing unsalted hashes.
As silly as it is, it's what I'm doing for a lot of my non-essential sites. Being able to see who I've signed up with is also nice, as I'm sure I'm signed up to a whole host of sites that I have zero memory of.

That, and Facebook supports two factor authentication and (hopefully) isn't leaving their pw db as unsalted md5...
Wait...Amazon App Store? So you didn't put it in Google's Play Store, too? There are roughly 60x more users with access to the Play store than Amazon Appstore. I don't know what you have heard about Amazon's app store - probably that is more "efficient" at making money "per app" than Google's Play Store, but Amazon has a much smaller user base. We're basically comparing 350 million users (Android) to 5 million users (Amazon).

Also, if you do port it on the "real" Android and the Play Store, you should try an ad-supported free version, too. The problem with paid apps on Android is that Google doesn't have a very large Checkout/Wallet user base, and it's a huge obstacle for people who don't have this account to make it right then for a single app that they may want. They are building the userbase now with ICS, since they are asking everyone to sign-up for it, but ICS only has a 7% market share so far, so it will take a while until everyone has Android 4+.
Last.fm also has an affiliate program for labels (http://www.last.fm/uploadmusic).

By gaining access to these accounts you can do a lot of damage (eg. steal money from people accounts or destroy a label presence on last.fm).
Jeepers, I just changed my linked in password. I had the source for PGP back in 1993, I don't recycle passwords for anything remotely important, I use gnarly long passphrases, two factor authentication and what-all else, and I AM SICK OF IT. I'm beginning to think that IBM had the right idea witht he thumbprint scanners in the laptops. I'm tired of the maintenance security imposes on me, the lack of a meaningful industry certification, and on developers' insistence that I use passwords of between X and Y length and containing particular combinations of characters, numbers, etc.

Every time I read about one of these avoidable breaches, I feel tempted to gin up a class action lawsuit and force a company to either write a painfully large check to acknowledge the time and trouble it has imposed on its customers - say, about $5 each - or sell itself to its users in lieu of money. I'm not actually going to go to that effort, but sooner or later some enterprising law firm will, and I'm sure everyone here is going to be all hand-wringy about it.

We need to automate security and make it customer-centric. It is plainly too complicated to be left to individual web service providers, just as brick-and-mortar stores do not manufacture their own door locks or burglar alarms. Vendors, if you feel you can't safely outsource this job to a third party, then you need to hire full-time security monitors and start facing up to security as a line-item cost rather than a check-box you can forget about after you've put it in place.

Sorry to be ranty, but when established firms are losing millions upon millions of passwords literally on a daily basis, something is drastically wrong with the state of the art. This is a problem that can't be prettied away with CSS or smoothed over with a few tweets and blog posts.
Incidentally, good on you guys for the Spanish translation.
Exec Story: Jennifer goes to Scotland
I at least plan to try out one of those $100 free Google Adwords setups to dip my toe into marketing. I am not an Adwords pro.
Also one password to change, though.
Which country are you/your employer are in? How big is your employer ? I know that in the US, it is against the law to not pay your employees for the time they worked no matter what. It is a serious offense. How much money is it ? Talk to a lawyer and take it from there. Do not do anything else on your own and keep all documentation of any communication so far where they clearly deny you your rightful paycheck on the grounds of you leaving in 2 months.
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My point was that sending the hash the server doesn't work if the hash is salted per user since you don't know what the salt is. (I suppose you asynchronously fetch the salt value after the user puts in a username, but at the solution as a whole starts to fall apart.)
Monstanto's own website says they have sued 145 times and only gone to trial 11 times. In the past I know they have indicated that they have settled more than 500 cases out of court but I can not find a good citation for that.

I personally believe that Monsanto is probably correct in most of their accusations against farmers but the imbalance of power that exists between the two parties means that Monsanto does have something of a free hand to do as it likes regardless of whether it is in the right or not. I am not from the United States but given what I know of the structure of the business down there if you can't use any of their products you will have a lot of difficulty continuing to earn a livelihood as a conventional farmer.
Correct, he just produced and distributed propaganda to encourage people to take up arms against a foreign oppressor.

Which, these days, is enough to get you and your family killed by a drone strike: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Alwaki
Voxer CEO: Why Getting Covered By Press Leads To Worse Products
Recently it's been Kap Slaps spring break mix.

http://soundcloud.com/kapslap/kap-slap-spring-break-mix
Flagging can be unrewarding to the flagger as well. If I'm hunting an apartment deal, email 100 ads, determine 70 are fake, flagging the fakes to remove the ads I already know are bad is just going to bring in more competition for the places I want. A lot of fakes reuse something, like pictures or contact information, etc. so you can identify their future posts as well.

The real world rewards are huge. I know people who have sublet a place worth $5k USD/month from someone for $2.5k USD/month because they hunted for a deal and found someone who had to go move and take care of their parents ASAP and that person didn't have any other immediate takers pop up so quick.
So based on 1 data (from your own app), your conclusion is that it is not worth building apps on Android in spite of more than a 100 million devices out there.

Is it possible there are already established apps on Android in your category?

Do you think it would be different if you actually ported your app at least a year ago?
Well, consider Arizona: right now, I have a grad-student housemate who simply cannot set foot there, despite being here 100% legally. Unfortunately for the purpose of visiting that state, he has noticeably brown skin, and his papers are hundreds of miles away in the home he grew up in. That's a pretty deep restriction on freedom.

Even if someone has their papers easily accessible, it's a very scary thought that if you're driving from one city to another, the government officer has the right to stop you and demand you show your papers for no reason. And that's assuming everything going on is above-board. If he came across a corrupt cop, it's pretty terrifying to think about the possibilities of what could happen.

And this is becoming the norm, simply because we as a society have decided that virtually everything is permitted to "protect our borders."
Wow, I went back in my browsing history here to figure out what I did and I had typed 'CryptocHat' rather than 'Cryptocat' (guess my eyes/fingers are just installing the H without my approval).
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I don't know that HFCS is "bad" vs. cane sugar. My only dig here is that generally speaking, eating alot of calories makes you gain weight.

The US government decided at one time that lowering the cost of food proportionally would increase overall prosperity by giving consumers more buying power. The unintended side effect of that policy is that heavily sweetened prepared foods are now cheap and ingrained into culture.
That "apart from a purely financial perspective" went full loop there. Because apart from a purely financial perspective why do people create apps for any plat at all ? Would the reasons be shared by plat or are you expecting to probe the "other side" with this exploratory question that puts money out of the equation.
You are also extrapolating a lot while not providing basic information for; number of kids on each plat, age of buyers on each plat that went and got your app, etc. That would help bring perspective to your anecdotal example and provide basic input about what sort of market it is that you are trying to analyze.

Myself, I write some software that runs on Android. Mostly Biz Intel and Rich Media deployed from servers that runs on Android enabled smartphone running clients, so none of the App Store experience here, but I like to develop for it because it is something I genuinely love to do. And the money is good too.
Any idea how I might go about finding the attorney? The websites "california employment attorney" turn off look oddly spammy. Also what kind of things would you look for in picking an attorney?

I am printing out forms for small claims now.
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Correct. They are dropping the Windows bit. Details here:

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-renames-azure-services
Mine was cracked, not used to access my account as far as I can tell. I changed it and some other passwords on other accounts that may have had similar passwords.
All your assertions are unsubstantiated. I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm just pointing out that you haven't explained any of your claims. You needn't go to any great length to cite sources, but a sentence or two of facts or explanation to match each assertion would make your post more useful to read.
Yeah Franklin is a guy who has some of the same interests and values as you. You could imagine having dinner with him. You could imagine being him.

The modern terrorist is none of these things.