skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here we have an example of complexity arising from copy protection/licensing. It so happens that this complexity caused a security vulnerability which, when exploited on any one computer, affects close to a billion computers.

Is anyone else infuriated that a vulnerability like this exists in what is analogous to copy protection code?

In other words, if Microsoft had been spending more of their resources on making software work, instead of making software work only when you've proven you've paid for it, this particular issue would not exist.
Ask HN: How do you cite your startup salary in future negotiations?
I'm looking at moving to a BigCo from a small but modestly successful startup. We've just begun the overtures of the salary negotiation dance; they've asked for my current salary/options/bonus situation.

How do I go about valuing my stock and options in the context of my "startup salary?" Can i give the equity stake FMV as of our last financing? Or should I hedge it higher/lower? One of our investors has volunteered to buy out any employee -- does that suggest a fair 'floor' for the value?

How do you respond when asked for your "salary history" if you've taken a low salary/high stock position, and that stock has/hasn't panned out?
NASA's budget has been cut every year since 1998, as a fraction of the federal budget

The fact that the federal government's budget grows like a cancer does not mean that NASA's budget is austere, nor does it mean that NASA should get more.

It's simply absurd to claim that your budget has been "cut" when it has actually been increased, even in real terms. Your argument sounds like the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Racketeer Rabbit", where they're counting the loot: "One for you; one for me. Two for you; one, two for me". Somebody else getting money does not mean that you're entitled to additional money.

SpaceX is an exceptional startup and NASA has been in business since the 60s. A typical web startup can outpace IBM and Microsoft too.

The online conclusion I can see to draw from this is that NASA should be wholly disbanded. We'll create a new one, since even a typical startup should be able to outpace the old-time behemoths.
How Bitcoin brought privacy to electronic transactions
Delusional and Actionable: My daily plan by hour as an entrepreneur
The same would happen on ubuntu if someone steals the repository keys. This has nothing to do with copy protection.
It doesn't sound like there's any dispute about what happened.

Woah, hold on just a minute there!

The only reason there is no dispute is because we're getting the story 100% from one side. I don't know either of these people involved and I suspect none of the commenters here do either. There are several possible narratives that fit this story:

* "Sleazy dude attacks woman"

* "Clash of cultures; open-marriage dude meets conservative girl"

* "Crazy bitch made it all up"

A couple days ago there was a HN story about WhosHere suing WhosNearMe and the
thread was full of "we need to hear the other side before rushing to judgement". This insight seems to have been lost here.
Most might be too strong, but it seems pretty bad. The chicago office is gone as a result of the acquisition I'm told.

Reports are starting to roll in about other locations

http://betabeat.com/2012/06/meebos-engineers-headed-to-googl...
I'm not sure your views on timing are appropriate. Airplanes revolutionized travel, but I don't think everyone booked a trip once the Wright Brothers flew. I also don't get why competition amongst big players to "win" the payments, ticketing, and loyalty section is harmful or why it precludes NFC from succeeding in the West. Besides that, just because these are the three existing uses of NFC technology that people deem profitable, that doesn't mean there's not something else out there. It's young. I also think your arguement is targeted at B2C and I think it overlooks B2B uses.
Oh look, another scaremongering and purposely misleading article from F-Secure. This is starting to become a regular thing isn't it; I guess the recession must have hit them particularly hard.
I have to second this. I worked on two NASA space telescopes (both X-ray telescopes), and although we had on the ground something like the telescopes that were flown, the equipment on the ground was not flyable, and if the launch rocket had blown up, we would have been SOL.

In fact, some of the folks down the hall from me had a telescope they were working on fail to deploy properly after launch due to the canister containing the telescope not opening. There was no spare telescope--they had to start over from scratch.
Nice work, thank you so much for fontawesome!

I use them in every bootstrap project now; can't live without resizing and colouring my icons.
anyone has evidence of similar projects done in java and javascript showing how js is much more expressive?

Sure, the lines end up less wide, but while you gain something by using function() over inner classes, you also end up reinventing package declarations and visibility all the time, so I don't see a clear advantage of one over the other.

(notice: I do understand people will generally do things in Java that they won't in JS, such as adding setters and getters, but I have seen that done in plenty of "big" js libraries, so I doubt that counts.)
There's always JungleDisk: https://www.jungledisk.com/
> Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market.

Source?
I currently use PHP and ZendFramework at a startup that I'm working at right now. However, I definitely think the workflow could use some work and that combined with my aspirations to be a well rounded web developer has led me towards other web frameworks.

I currently love the startup atmosphere and don't plan to ever work for a large corporation. Do you think that there is any place for Play Framework in the startup scene?

For example if myself and a couple excellent Java programmers from my school tried to apply to an incubator, would we be taken seriously or written off immediately just because we picked Java for our language of choice?
Is that the version that has been accepted in its entirety? I haven't been following this but also found another version on their mailing list:

> The Debian Project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone.

> We are committed to being a community that everyone feels good about joining. Although we may not be able to satisty everyone, we will always work to treat everyone well.

> Whenever any participant has made a mistake, we expect them to take responsibility for it. If someone has been harmed or offended, it is our responsibility to listen carefully and respectfully, and do our best to right the wrong.

> Although this list cannot be exhaustive, we explicitly honour diversity in age, culture, ethnicity, genotype, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, neurotype, phenotype, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, subculture and technical ability.

> Ideas and wording for this statement were based on diversity statements from the Ubuntu community <http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/diversity>,
the Python community <http://www.python.org/community/diversity>; and Dreamwidth Studios <http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversity>.

> This document is usable under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA license.
Run Android apps on Windows with BlueStacks
Class Action lawsuit accuses Facebook of misleading investors prior to IPO
Halo 4 live action trailer and gameplay shown at E3 (video)
She mentions exercise later on in the article, and implies that she exercises regularly.
> Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market.

Let's throw bullshit in the air, it's not like anybody has numbers or give a flying shit about them anyway.

> Consoles [...] are the future of gaming platforms.

Consoles have been the future of gaming platforms for 25 years now. And oddly, computers are still there as gaming platforms with developers and distributors making significant amounts of money from them. Hell, computer-based gaming has never been better as far as I'm concerned, the big shitty franchise-based publishers are getting the fuck away from it and indies are coming back to the front of the scene.

Consoles are not the future of anything, they're a gaming media amongst others. And mobile is nice, I play a lot on my phone, but let's not kid ourselves: it's the future of killing handled consoles and that's about it.
Dumb Kids' Class
Racist Culture is a Factory Defect
Honest question - is it not?
I'm curious, could you please quote some of the points you thought were purposefully misleading in the article?
Well... No, it'd be like if ubuntu required you to sign up to corporate licensing in order to use Ubuntu. Then handing out misconfigured keys to corporate customers which could also be used to sign repos as an unfortunate side effect.
Also, during the W administration much of the money for real science was redirected towards a manned mission to Mars. This caused terrible financial woes for the department I worked at at MIT for many years that does X-ray astronomy (The Center for Space Research). Quite a few people were laid off, including me, due to the CSR not being able to get the science funding from NASA it always had been able to get previously.
Microsoft reinvents the wheel with Windows 8
Could social discovery apps spoil true serendipity?
Hm, yeah, trees to make me feel more placid and less oppressed than concrete, you're right. I wonder if, with less anger/feeling of being trapped, would-be criminals would rationally see other ways out of their crappy situations.
Has anyone done any latency test between USA and Hetzner's data center (Germany) and can share their numbers?
I voted you (and the parent post) up, FWIW, even though I'm a huge fan of Steve Blank's work. I did also notice that this particular post wasn't as chock-full of useful info and insights as many of his previous posts have been. I don't know that I'd go as far as to call it "just an ad" but it wasn't what I usually expect from Steve's blog.
But my point is that more teams needed access to signing keys because some of those teams were dedicated only to licensing issues. If they didn't need signing keys, those keys wouldn't have been compromised.

I suppose I can break it down another way.

Complexity introduces vulnerabilities.

Some complexity is necessary for the software to accomplish what the customer wants.

Some complexity is arguably necessary to protect the interests of the vendor. This is arguable because it varies between open source and proprietary software.

To me, it is upsetting when the code to protect the vendor's interests is where a critical security vulnerability exists. I don't think this is a controversial statement.
>Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market.

So we're doing that thing where we just make shit up now about the largest gaming market in the world?

Consoles are a primarily American/Japanese phenomenon with some other western countries participating. PC gaming is how the entire world games and it's growing faster than ever.
7.1 Percent In 7 Months
Thanks much noisebeuter!
Has there been any development on that lately? They haven't even updated the blog for over a year.
On the first part, I agree, NASA's budget is basically constant in real terms over the past 2 decades or so. The bigger problem imo is not the total amount of money, but all the strings it's come attached with, and in particular constantly-changing strings. If NASA got $17 billion and the freedom to decide how it should be best used to advance scientific goals, that would be one thing, but instead every President and Congress has their own pet ideas about what NASA should do with the money, and so it ends up getting allocated to a rotating parade of prestige projects that end up going nowhere.

On the latter point, I don't see NASA as really less efficient when they're given freedom over designs. They have some pretty impressive low-cost-satellite programs that teams of scientists have put together out of small bits of discretionary funds. And while StartX is impressive for a private company, I think it'll be some time before they're doing NASA-level work. For example, none of the private sector companies seem to be even attempting scientifically useful things like space telescopes, Mars rovers, or interplanetary probes, even though there is no technological barrier to doing those (they're doable with literally decades-old technology).
I know because I've done some work in Max/MSP (specifically, in Max4live). Visual programming makes it easy to experiment and try new things. On top of that, the visual programming systems I've used (mostly Max and Synthmaker, but I've tinkered with one or two others too) have had far superior interactive environments than most textual programming languages. Personally, I find the Max environment much better than both the Python and Clojure REPLs (these are currently my two most used textual languages that support some form of interactive programming). Max also has a really convenient debugger which visually shows you how data flows through your program.

My ideal programming system would let you program in both textual and visual code interchangeably (and ideally let you convert one to the other at will).

As an aside, one observation I made when interactively programing in Max is that one of the things that I find most useful for experimentally developing is the ability not to name things. I find textual languages are pretty bad at this: you have to name functions, you have to name variables, you have to name structs/classes - in a visual language, you can usually leave things unnamed. While this would be bad practice in a finished program, it is incredibly convenient while you are trying out ideas before you've committed to a solution and the fact that you can visually see where the data flows, I find its nowhere near as confusing as, eg, anonymous functions or badly named variables in textual languages.

Having said all that, visual languages are far from perfect and are unlikely to ever replace textual languages, but I do believe that a visual language could be created that solves most of the problems with existing visual languages that would, for a large class of programs, be better suited than textual languages alone (certainly if, as I said above, you could mix and match visual and textual at will).
Is popular music becoming sadder?
because science focuses on repeatability and control. personal successes do not. Any thing that passes as science has been proven to a degree of certainity, by definition. Any science is good science because it's been proven, and then there is science that got famous.
I imagine Groupon is like Amazon - providing an easily copied service but having some early mover advantages. And like Amazon instead of taking profits they are investing in growth.

Like let's say Amazon with their current trends sees $600 million profit next quarter. Instead of taking that $1 billion profit they plow it into advertising and loss leading promotions until the projected profit is down to $100-150 million. This gives them bigger revenue growth, more users, etc. while still turning a modest profit which let's the execs hit their bonuses.

And just like Amazon the short term profits above all else mentality of investors doesn't get excited about this.
> why most programmers are used to imperative programming.

Probably because that's the paradigm of the most popular languages, the first paradigm everybody learns in college and university and likely the first language a person will encounter? Because most programmers are despite what they would say about themselves in public, actually stubborn language bigots? I would think about that because it puts functional programming (or logic programming (or proof-based programming (or stack-based programming))) at a disadvantage and a fair conclusion cannot be derived from uneven exposure.

Consider the actual research done in this area, classes have demonstrated that whatever the language, there is always the same distribution. Those that excel (small group), those that succeed through hard work and do good (most of the group) and those that just don't get it and fail (small group). This has been shown to be true for C, Visual Basic, Pascal, ML, LOGO, Scheme (SICP!) and even Coq!, which is a proof-assistant. Probably Prolog, too, but I haven't looked at that. You can easily google this, just search for things like "lecture/semester findings" and "student reactions/performance" and insert your language of interest.
I think that is one of the things giving us pause is the price.
No. I'm just as tired of seeing it repeated here as I was hearing people repeat "Twitter is dumb and useless and not going anywhere" 3 years ago. Just because you don't use it or subscribe to people that use it, doesn't mean the rest of us didn't take the time to actually utilize it.
Analysis of the Linux Random Number Generator [PDF]
Kind of like paranoid internet users setting up TOR implies their guilt as well.

I wouldn't make assumptions. There's a valid point in wanting to defend your thoughts and intentions.
And here come the shills, one or perhaps two at a time to defend the article from any critique. I'm afraid I've grown bored of this dance, entertaining as it may have been I've become listless.
> My main problem with most NoSQL solutions is that I have to tweak the problems I have to fit the solution, instead of the other way around. Technologies that can be tweaked simply rock.

Well, I would disagree. While it's great that sql databases let you do lots of joins, I would lose imagination of my query complexity very fast (also, you can't review all sql-queries stopping people from doing joins and "where tablename.status=active" in every joined table). While MongoDB would restrict you from that, but gives you "documents". I'd say it's a lot of power of complexity-clarity (having no joins, but power-enough documents).

p.s.: and yes, I agree with you that developers are ok with postgres on most of cases. more of that, it's better to have transactions and other stuff until it's performance-urgent to disable it).
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Writing Node.js modules in ClojureScript
the official page has the version i quoted. what you quoted also looks kind of familiar. maybe an older revision.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2012/05/msg00011.html
But you do. If you make an iphone app and it's an overnight success, you got lucky (the non-luck part is the years of experience that it took to make the app). However, if you slowly build your user base and continue to add new features for years through many failures/successes, beyond the normal 10% or less luck in every-day life, I wouldn't consider it lucky.

Again, it seems there is this trend on HN to make it seem like anyone remotely successful got "lucky". Even worse is blurring the line between luck and hard-work so you can make it seem like their accomplishments aren't as important.
I think there is a bit of an issue with _the code you don't write_ , because you rely on third parties.

Today, I spent five minutes tracking down a

SyntaxError: Unexpected token u

It was honestly hard to read this as "don't give an un-itialized value to this function or it will end up being passed to JSON.parse that will happily treat undefined as a string".

I'd take a NullPointerException with a proper stacktrace everyday.
I'm looking forward to trying this.

Also, happy to help w/ some quick copy editing. Is the joosy.ws site in github somewhere?
Meebo was about to lose most of their remaining (they'd already lost a few) key employees to better companies anyway. A Google buyout with incentives to keep the employees around was really the only way this was going to end well.
I have no doubt that startups including meebo got talents. But how does google maintain its bar of engineer qualification? Or does it?
> Guess what. PostgreSQL is just another SQL database.

Uh... hstore says "I'm not quite sure what the bloody hell you're talking about". So does ltree.
800px-width bookmarklet (may be useful even for HN)
No, when Google offered them $6 billion, it was worth $6 billion to Google (unless Google was lying).
You're missing the point. Chrome does respect your global DNS configuration.

The article is about how Chrome cleverly makes DNS requests (to your resolver of choice) as early as possible.
Some businessmen feel obligated to "give back." Who says they've taken anything?

Paul Graham responds, "They've taken something from chance."
Well, having worked with various 4GLs that were meant to improve productivity and produce re-usable code, ones that are being used merely add more accidental complexity rather than reduce it.

And a diagram (in such a 4GL) does not help when it has hundreds of decision nodes and the end-user (read: a human being) visual system can only deal with at most 10 nodes.

It is also very amusing when the executives finally realize how unnecessarily complex their order processing chain is.
No, this simply isn't true. If it was, oligarchies would never become established.

Failing a strong leader that can create monopolistic conditions in a market, oligarchies are the norm. The reason for this is that the status quo is often more desirable than the risk required in advancing your position.

What you are suggesting will only happen if for some reason, competitors view themselves as enemies. The reality is that it is often the opposite, and nobody wants to rock the boat - except for the upstart.

It's for that reason that new competitors are almost a requirement, never mind a benefit.
Hey, just published my after action report on publishing my first Node.js module written in ClojureScript. I was trying to fill some gaps in the existing documentation and pool together the research I did for the project. Hopefully some people here will find it useful. I would appreciate any feedback pro or con. Thanks!
Because if I was being sexually harassed, I wouldn't stay around the harasser long enough to pull out a camera phone and record the (horribly vulgar) advances - especially considering the risk of the harasser becoming violent when recorded. I would get the heck away.
For anyone looking to get some excellent games on their Linux box, don't miss out on the current Humble Indie Bundle. Amnesia, Psychonauts, LIMBO, Sword & Sworcery, and Bastion. Pay more than $1: get codes to unlock on Steam.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

Credit to Humble Bundle for showing that DRM-free can be profitable, and Linux can make up a substantial slice of the revenue pie.
Adblock meebocdn.com and they go away.
For those that might be confused, the actual vote page is http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_002 and goes into detail about what is being voted on.

I don't think Debian has a problem with diversity; as an example, the Debian Women group has been around since 2004: http://women.debian.org/home/ Maybe this is more about getting non-programmer/sysadmin types involved in Debian. (There's an interesting interview with the proposer, Francesca Ciceri, here: http://raphaelhertzog.com/2012/04/06/people-behind-debian-fr...)
As someone pointed out elsewhere on HN today, it's one thing to have a profitable core business, and reinvest large portions of it in growth (resulting in short-term losses.) Groupon's problem is that its core business may not be profitable at all, because it's costing them more to secure new business than they make off those customers.
That toolbar has improved a lot since I last saw it, it used to make the websites all jerky and difficult to browse.
1 in 11 chance of being a millionaire? That must be far too high? Then there would be 31 million millionaires in the country, or about the population of California.

Edit: and then he says 1 in 120 of earning $400k or more... so that does that work with 1 in 11 being a millionaire?