skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead of working and working to get a decent surface finish with paints, we just get a big piece of lexan and put it over whatever we want the backdrop to be (usually just the wall of the room).

Lexan is clear, scratch resistant and super easy to erase.
EC2 comes with a free Chaos Monkey service. It's called EC2.

I know, they're trying to make it reliable and they've got a bunch of very hard problems to solve. That doesn't change the fact that sometimes some of my servers just permanently stop responding to pings until you stop-start them, or get crazy-slow I/O, or get hit by these once-in-a-while-and-always-at-night outages.

It's great when you suddenly need a hundred more servers, though.
What other popular language is as bad? COBOL?

I don't know about impeding the development of good software. Warts can always be worked around as long as you know about them and how to handle them. But that doesn't mean they don't matter, and PHP has so many that it's difficult to enumerate them.

What other popular languages silently convert strings to floats and then do math or floating-point comparisons on them? What other popular languages have literally hundreds of failing unit tests in their mainline implementation, allowing ridiculous and insecure regressions that were actually caught by testing but never noticed to ship in an official release?

I doubt there's any one wart that's exclusive to PHP. What's remarkable about PHP is how it manages to gather so many in one place. Each one alone is not that bad, but the sheer number of them is astounding.
He meets with customers in person to verify their identity and exchange bitcoins. No.

How do you seceure yourself for something like that?

Probably by being careful.
I don't disagree that Python/Go/C#/Ruby represents a bigger upfront learning and potentially cost investment. I think it pays off in functionality, development speed and flexibility in the long run is all.
2. Erm..because I interviewed there and found out the next day that the question I had been asked was an exercise problem in Skiena?

4. Well, I am not suggesting interviewing if you are happily married to your current job. I thought OP was not happy and wanted to interview to get a new one.
I've seen too many sites with XSS vulnerabilities to think it's a bad idea.

Negligence should result in mangled output, not a security problem.
That would require contractors to give the code back to DoD. As far as I know you have to give source of GPLed code to the users you are distributing binaries to, not necessarily to the general public.
Multi-AZ RDS deployment is supposed to protect you from that though. That's why it's 2x the price. We should have failed over to a different AZ w/o EBS issues.
It probably is the most used, being a cheaper alternative to us-west, but are you suggesting it fails more because it is used more? It does seem that the big AWS outages (in the us) have been concentrated in us-east. I have wondered if it just because us-east is newer so they haven't had has much time to work things out, or that the us-west team is a little better?

edit: btw, I am not dismissing "used more" as a valid theory. More use = more hardware = more complexity which could lead to more failures.
The command is challenge <number>
I obviously tried it before commenting, but props to you for implying a statistically possible situation of me being a troll. Well I'm not :P

Chrome works slower and that's a fact. Its keyboard is custom, but inferior to Mobile Safari by far. Its syncing options are superior, but all in all you cannot say it's better than Mobile Safari. Unfortunately, you cannot say Mobile Safari is better either... But not being able to set Chrome as default effectively renders it useless.
From the perspective of a Python program, being memory bandwidth bound is the same as being CPU bound: you have the GIL, your process is in the running state in the OS, and is currently executing on a core.

(I assume you mean truly mean bandwidth between main memory and the processor, and not to disk.)
"I think it's clear from the basic summary statistics graph that only one audio sample here was discernably different than the rest – the 128kbps CBR".

Well, no, it isn't clear to me, at least not with the data in an un-sorted table. But visually, yes, it is clear: http://i.imgur.com/08s2S.png
>Desktop Linux is the reason people don't use Linux on the desktop. I'm sorry but it's truly awful and probably won't ever get better. In the absence of product direction you have us geeks making everything configurable

Have you tried Unity or G-S lately? I'm not as willing to argue G-S has as clear a direction as Unity, but they both ship with a very limited amount of configurability and they're both insanely easy to start using even without background knowledge.
He's right. Most of the time, the things that tip me off are the misspelled words and poor grammar; also, the conflicting information. For example, getting an email message from Chase Bank with a signature from a Wells Fargo employee. A lot of people are one well versed phisher from losing a lot of time and money.
Pingdom does a good job of it, if you point it at a public-facing web site you particularly care about. I'm not affiliated with them; I've just been woken up by them.
Maybe it needs to get worse before the tipping point is reached though and API developers start genuinely caring for the wellbeing of their developers and acting with a greater deal of integrity and empathy.

Established businesses should feel less secure today as it seems far harder for one business to have a stranglehold on the market. Software distribution costs have been lowered by the internet. Development costs have also been lowered because we no need to push wheelbarrows of cash to Oracle, et al. We have better tools, better infrastructure, and shorter development cycles. Marketing is easier, cheaper, and more apt to give rapid feedback.
Infographic: The Generation That Doesn't Power Down
Please use challenge <number> where number is >=5. Updating the problem text as well as the code
One thing I'd like to add to this from my own experience is: The trick is to Just do it.

Lately, I've seen this trend when guys are waay to concerned over which language, platform, etc to use. Will it be Coffeescript or Javascript, CSS or Less, Apache or nGinx, PHP or Python, Mysql or MemSQL, and on and on.

At least in my own experience it doesn't matter that much, but what matters most is that you pick something (if it's your first startup it has to be something fast + easy) and you stick with it with just one goal: you get the first version out of the door as soon as possible and start collecting leads.

Because funny thing is, your lead does not care how you're inserting him into the database as long as you do it okay. But if you waste a month deliberating the perfect tools the time you've lost has been lost forever. The same time you could have spend converting those leads into paying customers, getting your site in Google, marketing, etc are all a month behind (even worse sometimes due to analysis paralysis you get either too busy learning something or too bored with the idea that you may never finish).
Probably an instance of this?

[T]he obvious giveaways are used as a pre-qualifier, to ensure with the least possible effort that the ONLY people who respond to the scammers' initial mass mailings (and therefore have to be brought along individually during the later stages) are the absolutely most gullible, ignorant, susceptible, suckers they can find.

http://www.quora.com/Scams/Why-are-email-scams-written-in-br...
If the JIT engine in Nitro had a JIT Spray vulnerability and Nitro was a shared library could it allow an attacker to inject code into other applications that also use Nitro?

Not that shared libraries are a problem, just that JIT'ing introduces a new attack vector that is hard to secure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIT_spraying
What is really cool is to actually see an SR-71. The Intrepid in NYC has one on deck along with the retired shuttle Enterprise. There's a Concorde and some other cool aircraft too.
I switched from PHP to node.js and haven't looked back since. And I know node has its shortcomings, but in time I have no doubt that they will be sorted out. Right now it does absolutely everything I need it to do and more.

A huge part of node's appeal to me (and many others, I'm sure) was the fact that I already knew javascript. Making the switch couldn't have been easier.

I used to defend PHP; but now when I look at PHP code, even well-written code, it just makes me go "ugh".
The game worked fine for me, just double check "challenge 1" since it asks for a range between "1 and 0"

A few observations:

- If you start <= 6, you will always lose, since you have to choose 1 less than the starting number.

- Whoever gets 6 on their turn will always lose.

- If you start between 7 and 11, you'll always win.

- If you start at 12 or higher, you'll usually lose, since the computer will try to get you to 6.

Still fun for a few minutes atleast. No idea how people are winning 20+ games.
I disagree. Especially because his pay is so low compared to market rates. I managed to interview for with a new company, get an offer at 15% up from my current pay, threaten to leave, and get a counter offer from my current company at 5k above my outstanding offer.

They are taking huge advantage of you at 45k. They know this. If you have other offers in hand, or even make it known you are looking around, your current company will try to give you incentive to stay (in $$$). If they don't, they probably are not worth staying with anyway.
yes, who wrote the bug

...and who reviewed the bad design

...and who reviewed the bad code

...and who wrote the bad tests

...and who built the spaghetti system that can't isolate failures

...and who pushed new code to production without smoke-testing

...and who demanded the product ship before it was ready
I live in a country that has closed captioning on all tv-content and on most content on national video streaming services. I don't see why this should be of any problem for company like Netflix.
That Russia and China doesn't sell their radar to? Name one?

Stealth is just more dollars for the industrial war complex, especially if they are just going to switch to an army of remote control drones now.

Let's swap the military and NASA budgets for just one year.
I do -- because I work in a shop that values getting stuff done.

But if you work in a shop that values covering you ass, then you should cover you ass and not care too much about getting stuff done (and then make a plan to get out of there).
no you didn't get the real invite. It will come later today or over the weekend. It will be a ticket, not a sign up.
Exactly what I thought. I wonder how much money is transacted in WoW, Second Life and other large mmorpgs.
it's cheap, it's fast enough, it's everywhere, tons of docs/examples/plugins/support. It just works. If PHP can't do what I want it to do, then I will use something else.
Social Scoring with Klout, Kred & PeerIndex
I've always thought about how easy it would be to make properly done scareware. Shame (sort of) that nobody's done it.
well, I always yell at others for creating graphs which aren't anchored at 0, so here you go: http://i.imgur.com/7YrHi.png
Pandas is outstanding, I love it.

This may not be the place for this, but...

I just built pandas 0.8.0 and it would not build with MinGW 0.5. The problem is -mno-cygwin is no longer recognized by MinGW's gcc. My solution was to edit distutils/cygwincompiler.py and remove references to -mno-cygwin. THIS IS NOT PANDAS'S FAULT! I just thought I'd point it out in case other people run into the same problem.
Funny mixing PHP into HTML is one of the things I hate the very most. And is one of the first problems usually solved by PHP web frameworks. Well, templating is actually generally a primary component of "all pieces included" web frameworks in any language.
Thanks! It's not a throwaway, I've just been lurking for a few years and never needed to comment before.
iOS code signs all code that runs on the system. Compared to most other operating systems, this is a huge security win: without another exploit in that system, even a standard remote code execution vulnerability is useless. Nitro generates code at runtime, so it (by definition) needs to run unsigned code. With Safari, Apple can audit all the code necessary, but with third party apps, it would be easy for a developer to have their app exploited or even use the unsigned code ability to download new, possibly malicious code after the App Store review process.
Ask HN: How do I find the right hacker to help me build our startup's platform?
I'm currently the CTO of a bootstrapped startup that myself and our CEO started working on about 6 months ago. We have a great sales team, but I am currently the only developer working on the code base. We have a great product and our great sales team have landed a few big contracts recently with big name brands that will catapult our business to the next level.

We are currently profitable but have very limited income. We are in the black but currently not making enough to pay ourselves anything (or to offer salary based compensation for new employees). I currently have a day job consulting (I have to eat), and am committing nearly all of my nights and weekends to work on our product.

We have a lot of work to do in the next few months for these new big name customers. After those customers launch their products on our platform, I believe we will see a tremendous upswing in sales and can finally have the money to quit our day jobs and start hiring. However, this is probably at least 3 months out and there is a lot of work to be done before then and I need help. I guess it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

We are open to offerring equity and/or profit sharing based compensation (and possibly hire on as a full time salaried employee once we get the money stream to accomodate it) for a good developer who could help us build out our platform over the next few months.

I've exhausted my network, the few developers I know with the experience to help are too busy with other jobs/projects to really be able to commit enough to make an impact. I am now at a point where I need to start searching beyond my own network for the right person. So my question is, what is the best approach for finding this person? Where is a good place to start looking? Are there any strategies that have worked for other founders in the past, or any advise you can give?
Works now. Thanks.
That is the reason of total control over their platform, and that's where industry is going - Microsoft is also imposing the same restrictions in Windows RT. That is quite sad, because it doesn't leave much freedom to the programmers, demoting them to just the "apps" coders, there is no place for hackers in its true meaning.
PHP Devs: Time to Start Playing with More Toys
A 25 line Python keylogger for OS X
Humans have extremely high tolerance to abuse. Many businesses have this as their main pillar. Adobe famously continues to release worse and worse experiences with their products, and still have a popular costumer base. The masses simply have very low quality standards.
ok.

Static types solve it earlier though, especially for little-exercised code paths which could be forgotten or missed in testing.
Back in 2009, I was doing a lot of social network research with the Web Ecology Project (http://www.webecologyproject.org/).

Among other things, we captured a 100% set of tweets surrounding the election in Iran in 09, and released a paper on them. It was interesting, because it ended up all being a bit of a precursor to the Arab Spring and many current events in the middle east today.

I loved doing it. The API team was responsive, and although we were never able to get full Firehose (despite offerring large amount of money) we were able to easily play with and access a lot of data.

Much/all of that has changed. The API has gotten really complex to work with. The terms of service are no longer friendly. Getting whitelisted accounts for standard API calls is impossible, and overall feeling like we have any influence or use to Twitter is dwindling.

Whereas at one point I felt it was a joy to work with, now I feel its impossible. Getting the data to study is impossible (or expensive, since a few companies control the firehose), and there's the constant feeling of getting shut down at any moment. Plus, there's just too much data to grab given the clunky methods you have to use to do it. I'd kill for a hard drive of the 'network graph' with diffs over time. As-is, its impossible to answer certain academic questions.

To a certain degree, while Twitter is used far more now than in 2009, it feels boring, obvious and less important to me. So at the end of the day, nothing of value was lost, but I do miss it as it was interesting at one point.
Perhaps someone should make 'PYP', a Python that's easy for PHP programmers.

Like PHP, .PYP files would be templates with no limits on mixing presentation and logic. The filesystem hierarchy provides the default URL-routing.

But, you get the regularity/power/compactness of Python wherever you want it. (Perhaps, every line in a .PYP file beginning with '\' is meaningfully-indented Python.) If you ever want to hijack a part of the URL-space from the filesystem, there are routing utilities to do that.

Would such a glide-path from PHP to Python be a good thing? Or bad? ("The barbarians are at the gates!")
Are you a contractor? If so, you can be sure they are charging the client at least 2x your current cost to them, probably more if they pay you so little. This multiple they use also gives them room to pay you more. As someone state above, it might be tough to just ask for a raise, but it's much easier negotiate when you have better offers in hand.
Also, have you had your yearly review/raise yet? If not, I'd wait until after that happens, and see how it goes, to make some noise/moves. Maybe they are planning a big raise after the first year (my company did), and if you complain now/ask for too little, you may hurt your ability to negotiate after the fact.
Any bitcoin related website that has you "choose a password" and not a Passphrase, and perhaps mandatory 2 stage authentication, is just asking for it.
Ginseng en Ginkgo Biloba tegen ouder worden | Leef Nu Gezonder
What do you mean by "We'll start keeping a majority of funds in cold storage as deposits grow"?

Are you re-investing some of the deposits, and the ones that you don't touch are in this so-called "cold storage"? If yes, what percentage do you keep in cold storage, and why don't we get interest if you reinvest some of our deposits?
If your source EBS volume is horked then you aren't going to be replicating any data to your backup host while the EBS volume is messed up (since your source data is unavailable). EBS volumes also don't cross/failover between AZ boundaries.

Maybe there was something bad with your replication server before the outage? It's hard to guess without knowing exactly what was happening at the time...
Half the team at the heart of the RBS disaster were in India
Yep, I mean, I think Django is generally a better solution for the average website, as there are many site-related problems that the Django team have had many years to solve, as opposed to you re-solving them with Flask in a few months, however, then you have to learn Python and you have to learn Django.

With Flask, you just have to learn Python, as Flask is so mindfuckingly simple.
It seems odd to me that so many blogs are commenting that Chrome being the #1 iOS download today is some kind of global indication of the need to open iOS to Android-like levels of user customization.

Not wanting nor willing to get into the merits of that idea overall, but doesn't it strike anyone other than me as obvious that it's the #1 app for iOS today because it came out yesterday with much fanfare, it's free, and it's something most everyone is aware of and would want to play with?

An unofficial poll here in my office shows that everyone who downloaded it here did so to, in so many words, "play with it and see what it's like", though nobody yet has stated that they intend to replace their browser use with it.

While it's nice that you can get as much of the Google ecosystem on your iOS device as you can, I'm really not sure that the availability of that ecosystem on iOS is any sort of indication of the necessity of opening up iOS to embrace that ecosystem.

In other words, "If you want Android, you know where to find it."
Aside from being a totally unrelated product with no bearing on the quality of OP's, that magnet setup holding the business card seems cool.
Always useful in times like this: http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/general/pdf/1788.pdf particularly the section "Dating Events in the Vicinity of a Leap Second".
Misattributed to Bill Gates: "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because he will find an easy way to do it". I'm not sure who that's actually from, but the idea behind it is the same. However, one has to remember that to innovate while being lazy isn't actually simple. I won't go out of my way to make something cool and innovative because, well, I'm lazy. It's only when it saves me time and I absolutely have to do it, that I'll come up with great ideas (as "S" did when faced with her favorite toy).
jsfiddle?
Wassily Kandinsky Caught in the Act of Creation, 1926
I'm not an expert at this, but isn't Google Compute Engine supposed to be the EC2 competitor, which is also IaaS not just PaaS like Google App Engine?

And even that data for Google App Engine might be outdated.
Do you work in IT at RBS? Or at the next place to get hit?
A few things:

* I'm having issues with the terminal where what I type is not always on the bottom line. Also, the up/down arrows for getting command history don't always show what I would expect and I get latency fairly frequently.

Also spoiler here's an algorithm that will let you win every time where it is possible to win. I debated a bit about posting this, but if I didn't I'm sure somebody else would.

1. If number is divisible by 6, do not play since you'll always lose.

2. If the number is less than 6, do not play since it doesn't allow you to take them all in the first move, despite what the instructions suggest.

3. Otherwise, your first pick should be a number that takes the remaining number to a multiple of six (see rule #1). Then, you should look at what number the computer picks and subtract it from six when you pick your number.

Getting to the top of the leaderboard is dependent on understanding this and how much time you're willing to spend playing.

Or you could write a bot that plays the game for you. Then getting to the top of the leaderboard depends on who started their bot first and the quality of bots' network connections.
> What other popular languages silently convert strings to floats and then do math or floating-point comparisons on them?

JavaScript. Most of the "issues" around comparisons/conversions/etc equally applies to JavaScript as it does to PHP.

But PHP does some very stupid casts but it's really just one problem. In the lists of "failures" tend to show that same problem 15 different ways to show how screwed up things are. If your code is well designed and secure you don't encounter these problems anyway.

> What other popular languages have literally hundreds of failing unit tests in their mainline implementation...

I'll give you that. Since that happened, the PHP developers have worked to ensure it won't happen in the future. No platform is free of particularly big security fails (Rails).