skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fun with core graphics using the OpenTok iOS SDK
I love Ender's Game but my opinion of it has dropped over the years. His A Planet called Treason however affected me pretty deeply, and I still read it from time to time.
Scientists uncover evidence of impending tipping point for Earth
Not to toot our own horn, but we do (https://circleci.com). We make Continuous Integration for web apps, and occasionally a customer will have a "works on my machine" bug. I've definitely spent a couple of evenings on the phone helping customers out with this, even though it's clearly not our fault.

Every page in our app has a "Help" button, our About page has my phone number on it, our error dialog has a button to contact support. We love when people contact us.

To be honest, as much as I enjoy talking to customers, this is just good business, for tons of reasons:

- people won't pay if it mysteriously doesn't work, no matter whose fault it is

- customer development is essential to a startup, and this creates opportunities to talk to customers (when you're done, have a chat, don't just sign off)

- when something is wrong with your service, you have a personal connection to people who want you to succeed - so they tell you the problem instead of letting you accidentally lose customers.

- customers with whom you have a personal connection become your biggest advocates.

It certainly costs money and time to do this, but I don't think I'm going to regret it.
Hollywood Hack Day - Pregame
Yes, you're completely right. I was actually trying to illustrate the "tweakable knobs" concept in bcrypt in my nested example but I can see that my explanation was not helpful, and served to confuse the issue.

Thank you for clarifying!
I only have one tiny thing to say here.

Oh, BTW, I organize NodeConf.

I'm intrigued by these "topic tables" but I have to say that if they were considered for JSConf I'd have to advocate against them.

Here's why.

At a very large conference (over 300 people) you start to feel a little alienated. That's a huge number of people, and attendees tend to huddle together who already know each other. At an event this size having a way for attendees to find people with similar interests they don't know, break the ice, and have a conversation with a new person is a tremendous service and I'm glad to hear Fluent provided them.

But, at an event below 300 the dynamic is very different.

One of the things I try to do with NodeConf, and I know Chris thinks about at JSConf, is to reduce "coupling up". We try to get people to break out of the small groups of people they are most comfortable with and meet new people.

At a 200 person conference, over two days, you can actually have a conversation with every person. That's not just a possibility, it's a goal of NodeConf and JSConf.

While NodeConf is more specific and specialized JSConf is a melting pot of JS activity. One of the most important things that happens at JSConf is people having conversations with other developers who exist outside of their normal sphere of influence and comfort zone. That's why people from Smalltalk, Clojure and Ruby are invited to give talks.

There isn't another conference where the implementers of prominent client side technology meet so many implementers of prominent server side js tech. If JSConf added topic tables my fear would be that these conversations would reduce because it would be too easy to find more people in your comfort zone.

The goal of the parties and breaks isn't to get drunk and be stupid, it's to loosen people up enough to break out of their comfort zone and enable these conversations.
Install Bird Baths and Bird Feeders from The Garden Gates
My observation is simply that the claim that it doesn't make sense for someone to serendipitously discover that their crops are Roundup-ready isn't really true. Is it the dominant-probability hypothesis? Heck no. It is, however, sufficiently likely that sooner or later it will happen.

In fact, if the genes get out there in the wild, and Monsanto de facto forbids people from discovering this fact, it isn't inconceivable that the genes could spread far and wide without anyone actually noticing until much later.
I've tried to use Flippa before and I still don't understand the bidding process. If as a seller you don't act on a bid, it auto-expires after something like 5 days. To me it sounded like accepting a bid meant that was the end of the auction, but maybe it was just confirming the bid as an actual bid, which seems unnecessary. Either way, anything I tried to sell always had 0 bids, even though people were bidding on the sites.
Phil Libin and the Refusal to Pivot: Evernote Now Valued at $1 Billion
Actually, he was leaving the country[1], but I'm pretty sure that's ultimately beside the point. I have sincere doubts that cryptography was the reason for his detainment. By his own admission he had been detained four times in the previous three weeks[2]. Tweets quite often in support of Wikileaks/Assange/Manning, hails from Lebanon[3], makes strong indications that he is an activist, and just got done speaking at a human rights conference[4] - I have a hard time believing they stopped him because he wrote an encrypted chat program.

Did they ask him about cryptography? They probably did, but I'd bet dollars to donuts he brought it up first.

[1] https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/210363454954016769
[2] https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/210367538759086083
[3] https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/210386514369191936
[4] https://twitter.com/kaepora/status/208388821346299904
We're not a Cloud Foundry company, we really don't care about PaaS that much. We just needed something that fit our unique use case and that, in case the PaaS vendor didn't feel the same sense of urgency that we did for something we need, we could add in ourselves - I'm sure you're very familiar with that, Solomon. We're happily sending changes upstream whenever they're sufficiently high quality for everyone else.

So, 1.) We didn't want to (poorly) re-invent it ourselves, and 2.) We didn't find any existing provider that was able to match our schedule and needs. Cloud Foundry let us side-step both of those problems and launch. We'd be dead by now if we had waited.
Super interested! Just signed up.
Hardly even a news article - it's someone making supposition from a handful of tweets. Good fodder for the intertubess.
Why wrap everything in json? Then you'll just have to decode it on the other end. Just use url parameters, it's what they are for:

(new Image).src = '/errors?m='+encodeURIComponent(m)+
'&f='+encodeURIComponent(f)+'&l='+encodeURIComponent(l);

This way it also works on browsers that don't have native JSON (old IE mainly, but also firefox before 3.5). And those are also exactly the browsers where you are likely to get errors since you are probably not testing using them.
You get the new games if you paid more than the average when you originally purchased. I paid $7, which was a bit more the average when I originally bought the bundle (day 1), and the new games show up in my account.
I think I agree with you and am not sure where the disagreement is. Save possibly two points:

(1) Limiting debt issuance would only be expansionary if it didn't imply a reduction in government spending. And financing growth by expanding the money supply is a perfectly acceptable Keynesian solution. If this led to inflation and rising interest rates that would suggest the economy is no longer in a liquidity trap and the Fed could step in to rein in inflation while the government could go back to raising money on the bond markets.

(2) I'm under the impression that US banks reduced lending following the 2008 bailout. I seem to remember Andrew Ross Sorkin making this case, but either way - I don't think the best solution to the present crisis is a 20 year process of watching the banking sector delever as in Japan! Better to have controlled failures to wipe out debt and reduce moral hazard while making sure the economy is primed with the demand to deal with the fallout. How exactly to do that is a good question.
At today's interest rates a bank is a destination in the minds of depositors. It merely is holding value and preventing a loss in nominal terms.

Do you have evidence that people are leaving T-bills in disgust and investing in other assets?
"Some of us have long memories", but some of us have also moved on. I say this as someone that has been through the System 5 days, PC Dos 1.0, CPM, DR DOS, Novell, Borland, Word Perfect, etc.

In mobile, gaming, and SAAS/PAAS, Microsoft has been open and experimenting. As others have mentioned, they've contributed to the Linux kernel, after some stumbles on Kinnect they embraced the hacker community, etc. Microsoft, for all its failings, is still willing to try developing and creating new products and services. Not all succeed, Zune was just retired (for instance).

That said, comparing them to IBM? Really? The IBM that has basically gone out of it's way to cut research labs, decommission most projects, and become a purely services company that is in the process of outsourcing as much as it can? I will take one that is still trying to innovate and create products from consumer to the enterprise over a company hell bent on becoming mostly an outsourced enterprise services company (we already have EDS and others for that).

Personally, I am not a huge MSFT fan. My house runs pretty much all Apple (or Linux). Windows is confined to VMs (or the wife's corporate laptop). The two things that were "aha" for me with MSFT and how they were Windows Phone 7/Metro and Azure -- specifically the original post on anodjs.org with the title "We work at Microsoft and we use node.js". Five years ago, we would not have seen that.

Returning to my original gripe - yes, MSFT has lots of the old guard around; yes, parts of MSFT still think like they used to (or are in the Redmond cacoon) - overall the company is doing a lot to foster innovation and new platforms, you'd benefit by letting go of old grudges. The industry is small enough where some of the "bad people" have moved to "good companies" as well as the reverse.

That said, it is certainly useful to be watchful and see what future moves are made.
It allows you to avoid having people push up the price of your auction with false bids. For higher value sites it gives you a chance to confirm the buyer is able to pay.
When complaining about somebody else's non-native English, consider using of capital letters if you don't want to be yet another instance of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_Law .
You're completely right. Too funny -- i had written a comment about how there was probably some bullshit MBA phrase for the process of "correctly valuing passionate customers", but deleted it as overly cynical and offensive to the up and coming masters-of-the-universe on HN. Can't win! :)

I think it's still worthwhile to think about systems of people in terms of their aggregate actions as well as in terms of each being an individual.
Lost Passwords This Week From Hackers
I'm not exactly why it is so hard to connect to a local machine on your network. Either determine your local IP address or your network computer name.
There is no originality here. I have a lot of difficulty accepting this as anything but time spent adjusting CSS to conform to the reference image. Impressive for the time spent, but hardly art.
Never thought I would find a cookie policy in a site like this
For some reason I thought they were doing more than this, like proxying your JavaScript (hence PROXino), instrumenting it with try/catches to provide robust stack traces, but apparently not: https://www.proxino.com/p.js
I really like the landing page and the video. I'm not sure how the product itself can be better than window.onerror+Google Analytics though.
Can't help but agree with you here. I think tweeting (whether about the conference or not), surfing the web, reading/responding to email, etc. during a talk are symptomatic of the same inability to maintain focus and to think deeply when that's not PRECISELY what we want to be experiencing in a given moment.

Because of the fleetingness of the things we do online, even if the particulars are boring and mind-numbing (e.g., reading fifteen Cracked Top 10 articles in a row, or fruitlessly tweeting to tech celebrities in hope of a reply), we don't notice because the experience in general gives us the impression of fulfillment by virtue of its variety alone.
I gather that Xip.io have the same issue with cookies.
This may be the fifth one (actually more, if you count the Bundles that were developer-specific) but this time around the games in it are excellent. It's probably the best of their bundles ever. And the new games only add to that.
Head Injury Turns Man Into Musical Savant
Cheap Air Jordan 11 Concord 2011 Retro for Sale
It's worth noting that some common web performance techniques also don't play well with caching. Take a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4791807/data-uris-and-cac.... SPDY server push at least allows the resource to still be named (via its URL) so it can be cached and speed up page load times, although goodput may suffer due to unnecessary pushes. This is an area where there are active proposals: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/spdy-dev/TetVOinB-LM/discu....
I agree - I didn't explain this very well. The former utilizes taxpayer money, the latter doesn't. The first is an all-out investment, the second, a loan.

Also, the portion of the cash that is not used by the bank is usually deposited back at the Fed in the bank's excess reserve account (on which the Fed has now begun paying a small interest - in order to avoid capital destruction).

The portion that is used forms part of the liquidity injected into the overall system - which is the Fed's original intention anyway.

The Fed has a mandate to ensure financial stability by providing such a loan facility (why it didn't do so for Lehman - and whether it neglected its duty - is still a very controversial topic) - so I wouldn't consider a statutory duty to be a discretionary bailout.
Personally, I use Loggr (http://loggr.net) for tracking errors and events. You can tag your events however you want so it is really easy to track user sessions and so on.
I just went into my account and checked... If you don't accept a bid, it automatically rejects it after 72 hours. What is the point of accepting a bid below your reserve price or expiring bids after 72 hours on a 30 day auction? Lots of messages from users wanting to know why I "rejected" their bids and I didn't know what to tell them. I understand measures to prevent artificial price inflation, but anytime bids started becoming competitive, they would start to expire.
I'd guess that 37signals does at least 60 million a year in revenue from their main products (100,000 paying customers [1] times at least $50/mo avg). Sortfolio is such a tiny fraction of that, but still requires occasional attention (time + money). I'd shut it down, too.

[1] http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/jason-fried-scaling-st...
Why would anyone seriously considering buying the site bid earlier than necessary? If somebody wants it, buying it at close is when you'd place your bid.
Alright, I'll bite. Yahoo what? com? fr? ca? co.uk? And if you add the TLD, then you're back at square one - a simple regex and you can grab the email easily.
Diagnosing connection leaks in NodeJS and Postgres
The value of live tweets to others is not great, either (although it is nonzero). You can only cram about half an idea in a live tweet.

Any subtlety, nuance, or context just gets steamrolled as people struggle to type in whatever catchy one-liner they managed to comprehend while reading their phone.

The lesson for speakers: have a clear message and speak in aphorisms. Also, repetition.
Cloud Computing Technical Insights and Microsoft Offering
I mean I think there's no such thing as a liquidity trap, so I believe we disagree on that at least.

Regarding your point #2, yes I agree. But bailing banks out is exactly what Japan did. The certainty of regulatory capture by banks makes it better to just remove the government ability to bail them out. Let them fail. A moderate approach would be to limit bank mergers - too big to fail is too big.
Simply the fact that you can buy them in secondary markets.
Announcing “The Influencer 100″, Apps, and Start-up News
That's what the old version of Proxino did... but potential customers didn't like the proxy.
Gr8 Idea guys - I am just fedup with managing a blog vs focusing on writing a piece of content, seems you nailed. Signed up, looking forward to it
I don't get it, it's pretty easy to install a wildcard system on one's server right? Why would we go through this?
Best practices for running a software development team
The core functionality is currently very MySQL-specific. In theory a plugin could override a bunch of methods to target Postgres, and maybe even Redis or other persistent data stores with replication and import/export functionality. It would be a lot of work though.

I also made the mistake of putting "mysql" in the names of a few methods. At some point soon I'll change those to more generic names, and alias the old names to the new generic ones.
10 (or so) of the worst passwords exposed by the LinkedIn hack
29k since September 2004, and I listen to an album almost every day.

You're scrobbling songs during your whole work day, right? I disable it at work, since I don't pay much attention and end up with lots of plays I don't care much about.

(edit: my average is really 10 songs/day!).
Oh I'm well aware. I work on games that have sold on Steam and have been featured in both daily deals and prominently featured during their blowout summer/winter sales. The massive increased revenue on those days is undeniable. The question is what happens to user behavior over the long term. I'm personally guilty of not buying a new game because I know it'll be deeply discounted in the very near future. I know many others think the same way now.

A $60 title being discounted to $15 and seeing a 40x revenue spike is pretty cool. One of the most amazing indie game packages of all time earning a team of devs less than $1 per bundle sold is somewhat worrisome to me.
Growth Hacking 101
Self-salting with the domain name serves another purpose: prevents you from using the same password across multiple sites.

If your password is "password_linkedin", it's fairly obvious what the salt is. However, most released passwords are not heavily scrutinized. It's most likely that those using exposed passwords will instead try user@email.com / password_linkedin elsewhere.

You can also easily change self-salt so it doesn't fit any obvious pattern. What I do is a strong base password, then self-salt with the domain name. For example:

Mk3+e1_T2iei

I'm using "Mk3+e1_T" as the base password, "2" as a divider, and "iei" are the first 3 vowels of a domain name (LinkedIn in this example).
VCs are similar to all other investors: they buy when it is high they sell when it is low.

BTW, whoever invested in or started social gaming and iOS companies during that time is golden now...
You have no proof that you're not living in the Matix right now!
I think they set the minimum bid too high.

The fear that there will be a lot of customers who fail to reenroll after the transfer is well founded. Ditto to the idea that it wouldn't survive independent of the 37signals brand. Consequently, an opening bid at greater than one year revenue is much too high.
I don't fault your story or intentions, but this quote:

"That all sounds like bullshit to me. I was there, I looked in the partners' eyes, they weren't bluffing. They were trying to help us"

Really rings hollow with me. You may have believed you could stare into their soul to know their being, but these guys eat people like you for breakfast. You wouldn't see a knife to the back coming, so don't think you could look in their eyes and know they weren't bluffing.
I know what live tweeting is, I was inviting someone to explain how it is different from tweeting in terms of being an unnecessary distraction. With all the ways slides and videos and blog posts disseminate news following tech conferences I'm having trouble thinking of a less efficient way to do so than for dozens of people to be "live tweeting" nuggets from a talk 140 characters at a time.

This is not twitter-bashing, I really feel that as a matter of basic decency and for their own intellectual growth audiences should be actively listening and making connections so that after the talk they can have something more interesting to say than "tl;dr".

If you are so caught up in your initial reactions to a speaker that you pre-emptively distract yourself you are missing out on a lot of opportunities for insight into yourself and your community. I don't see the value in dozens of people flying to a city just to sit in hotel ballrooms and regurgitate things over the wifi.
Sadly neither is anything like the original iTunes. It really wasn't very different from iTunes now: Imagine iTunes without any references to a store, apps, movies, etc., completely focused on importing, burning, listening to, and organizing music.
> My comment was very specifically focused on you, acting as a solo developer/founder, not a person you'd hire.

Then "you," having acquired years of experience in designing and implementing distributed services, are making at least a 6-figure investment in opportunity cost.
Frequently asked questions about time travel - 2009: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910554/
Skype 5.9.0.123 Final Full Offline Installer on Downloads App
Facebook’s New App Center
The only thing worse than a customer that constantly calls and requires attention is one that doesn't call at all and finds your product or service useless. If the customer is bothered enough to spend his/her valuable time on your product, that means you have some value. I would much prefer this over a customer who doesn't trouble themselves to spend any time at all on my product and then mysteriously cancels later.

Yes, customer support has a cost. So does marketing and getting customer feedback as part of an MVP process. While I cringe when customers are demanding, I also realize how valuable it can be. But I make sure they pay their bills as well. And if I have a support contract, I make sure they buy it -- even if they squeeze the value of that to the last drop.
Then tell people to use secure_compare for everything, because virtually all web applications have much worse leaks than the time it takes to compare password hashes. The username example is far more potent in a real-world attack.
I really wish Windows would store this info in NTFS alternate streams. I'll have to check my files when I get home
Indeed.

It's easy to pin it on a nation state or intelligence agency, but it's worth considering the possibility that it was rogue elements in one (or both worlds) that exploited this (and various people) for purely financial gain.
Hi honey, what did you do today?

Oh, this and that. Let's see what's in the news, shall we?
I doubt my new password will be any safer, so I can't really use one which follows my current pseudo-random patterns.

I'm now convinced that password managers, with random generated passwords, are the way to go. At least they have a strong incentive to focus on protecting user data. Still scared of not knowing my own passwords, and giving them to a third party, though.
What's a "Hard Work" for a Startup?
This would have been a lot more successful if they privately shopped it around and had a plan to make the payments change seamless. If I am paying this site currently I would be uneasy about the way it is possibly changing hands.

Also a lot of people paying for it may have been attracted by the 37 signals brand.
Should I move from Delicious to this? What are the advantages of this over that?
Heroku going down isn't unavoidable downtime. It's clownshoes downtime.
> ... other crops require additional multi-million, even multi-billion, dollar outlay of new equipment and infrastructure to get started.

I think this is the problem with modern agriculture. It shouldn't be like that.

If there's a definition of non-sustainable it's surely spelled out quite clearly right there.