skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's weird to me that aQuantive is apparently not viewed as a massive failure for MS, even though they paid billions in cash for it and it's now worthless. But not only that, it was supposed to make them more competitive in a big market and didn't do that at all. So from a lay perspective it seems like that should be a disaster for Ballmer and probably others at MS, but it's being met with an attitude of "yep, that happened, and it doesn't really mean anything".
Ideology clouds how we perceive the temperatures
Speaking of gorgeous, if you're ever in a machine shop and get a chance to look inside the headstock of a top end 1940-1970s vintage engine lathe, do it. The quality and precision makes automotive stuff look like hammered pot metal.
They make up for it with the $10 shipping.
Good question. A "qualities" list might be useful. Needn't hit on all cylinders, but most/many would be a positive.

Someone with experience in:

- Software and/or hardware experience, obviously.

- International regulatory affairs. Microsoft continues to face (and initiate) anti-trust issues in the US, EU, and elsewhere.

- Deep corporate/institutional relations. If not from the inside, then on the "working with" basis. Extant large enterprise sales are still a large part of Microsoft's domain.

- Mobile. Devices, form-factors, interfaces, applications, future directions. It's clearly an important space, though I think Microsoft are a bit too obsessed with winning-at-all-cost (and failing as a consequence) in it.

- Entertainment. One of the current growth avenues (and one posited end-game for Microsoft) is in the games and content consumption space. It's one of the few areas in which Microsoft are arguably executing well, especially compared to major stumbles on competitors' (viz: Sony) part.

- Financial services/products. Even in enterprises which are otherwise Microsoft-free, the one standout is typically the CFO or bookkeeper's Windows box running Quickbooks, or other financial software.

Additionally, addressing Microsoft's traditional failing points would be helpful. Platform security against viruses, malware, etc. Hostile industry relations (Microsoft rabidly treats all peers as enemies, and has since very early times). General consumer trust. "Cool" factor (you've got to earn it though). A revenue model that can survive loss of software licensing / corporate sales / OEM. Chronic UI / usability issues -- very hard to address without pissing of existing customers. Relations with the Free Software community. As Bill Joy observed, "innovation happens elsewhere", and as Microsoft is knocked off its king-of-the-hill perch, it should find that being able to share and integrate software really is a good thing.

Things I'm not mentioning: Most prominantly, cloud computing. While I think it will be a part of Microsoft's future, I think it will emerge as something the support out of addressing much of the above, rather than as a primary focus.

I don't know enough industry personalities to put a finger on who's a good fit, but it might be fun to see who comes up.
The STS header has an expiration date on it.

Let's assume you have it set to 1 year.
If user A visits the site in March, receives the header, uses the site for a while.

In May, the site/user's DNS/whatever is hijacked. Users are sent to a dummy site, which does not set the header. The dummy site is over HTTP.

The next day, the user tries to go to the site. Because it is not over HTTPS, the browser refuses to load the page, even though the header is no longer sent.
it may very well be. the smart ones do thousand of small, "insignificant" transactions.
The company I work for uses it, I'm not thrilled - it's still rough around the edges and I'm used to writing my own SQL, but it gets the job done on the few projects I've used it (I only used V1 which was very bad).
Good physical health is your first step. Seriously.
This is called "Session Fixation". Most modern frameworks prevent it, which is a reason to use your framework's session functionality rather than re-inventing it.

Session fixation used to be a common problem. There were lots of J2EE applications which were not only fix-able, but which would allow an attacker to fix a session ID with a carefully crafted GET URL. It's much rarer now.
Altering tables in MySQL with no downtime using shadow tables
Davemcclure has some serious dancing abilities
So you can review a product thats available on Amazon without actually having purchased it? Surely thats a flaw?
Don't compromise your physical health. Ever. Without it, everything else is harder, perhaps not even possible.
In fairness though, a regular person shouldn't have to care--Firefox should just work, stay responsive, etc.

In fact, that isn't fair. Software has never been like that, and it's irresponsible to represent to non-technical users that it's possible.
Crowdsource Design Feedback
I've wondered if that isn't the case, actually, on some non-digital products. You'll see a bunch of sellers offering an item around Amazon's own price, and then someone else selling it for $999.00. Those could just be tests, I suppose...
Show HN: Yahoo! by Mayer
I actually really appreciate your comment about bureaucracy The main difference on my end is that I believe "working in a vast decentralized computer bureaucracy" is completely analogous to "working in tech" whether you like it or not. Bruno Latour's book Aramis is a case study in this idea. Brief review of that book here:

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~tmisa/reviews/Latour_Aramis.pdf

Any technologist who believes they're not working in a vast bureaucracy (both of the political kind and the technology itself) is not paying enough attention.
HN's own cperciva has created tarsnap.com

He's a crypto expert, so you should check out his service.
Great story. You have to admire this young man's drive, determination, and obvious intellectual precocity. He'll surely go far (he already has).

I also think it's inspirational b/c it points up the importance of synthetic scientific research done by folks who are so to speak 'out of the fold'. We need institutional science, clearly, but we also need people who can take a step back and look at the big picture and see how things fit together.
The other day I was looking for some music to listen to while programming. I found this playlist, whose serene music I enjoyed, but which didn't get in the way of my concentration.

You can click on the Play All button, or follow this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRXJ7IMcZhY&list=PL48627F...
I sure they meant "too long; don't read" to fall in line with their "prize" of coming to interview if you could make sense of the explanations and benchmarks.
Also of note is that most disappearing scroll indicators in Android are scroll bars; if you can drag on the indicator before it disappears, you can use it to quickly scroll large distances in a big document or list.
Most Chinese Internet users on mobile
I had problems with Inconsolata in PhpStorm 4. But this version works. Tanks a lot.
Ha ha, "install missing plugins" is such a zombie feature, I hope some (ex-) development manager from Mozilla cringes every time they see that on a new installation.
The hubris in some of these comments are incredible. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but wanton armchair criticisms aren't constructive in the least.

Microsoft has a great number of flaws, and "hurf durf Ballmer is a dunce" doesn't really address any of them.
I found I couldn't enter my password in unusual situations, e.g. holding the keyboard in one hand, typing with the other. I finally cottoned on that my fingers' muscle memory was typing the password consistently but it wasn't what I thought it was; it had been corrupted by similar N-grams in Unix commands from the moment I'd first entered it twice to passwd(1).
Is there an "inverted" kickstarter anywhere? Basically putting out a request for Widget and companies/individuals present offers to provide Widget. Close the loop with a kickstarter-type order/financing aggregation and you get purely demand-driven products.
It may provide a tax benefit offsetting the sales of Windows 8 this year, but it will definitely cost them a lot of red ink.
The Rise And Rise Of Influence
Apple must run "Samsung did not copy iPad" ads
Here is what I get in my "Customers who viewed this also viewed" list:

120293-0001REVK: $10mil (various electronic components?)

Zenith Men's Extreme Tourbillion watch: 90k

6-in-1 keychain multitool: $9.95

Dating for Dummies: $14.95

Giant inflatable human hamster ball: $1,699.99

Tactical Bleeding Zombie Target: $94.59

I assume you guys are responsible for these?
AdBlock sucks on Chrome due to Google's architecture choices.
"He's not working on getting people to click ads."

A great point. I didn't think of it from a role model point of view.
What would you do with 1 Gbps?
Since I already read it once, I'll give you a 50% discount.
“What happened to “great artists steal”?”

That's because the inverse isn't valid. Not every thief is a great artist. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook apparently didn't consider Android to be great art.

The original quote, to put in context what Jobs was referring to:

“One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” —Philip Massinger

http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...

NB: Jobs mistakenly attributed it to Picasso, who never said such a thing. Jobs probably read Richardson’s biography of Picasso, in which the text is misquoted and attributed to T.S. Eliot.
Except that the target audience for this launch campaign is other website owners / webmasters, not the senate or the general populace.

I'm sure if they start doing anything in earnest for the general public the campaign materials will change.
Video Tour: All of iRobot's Coolest Stuff
If you're in an oppressive country (say Syria), for example, is it a bad assumption that you're always being MITM'd, and unless you leave the country (not likely) EVERY first contact you make is already compromised? It's a tough chicken and egg problem.
I should clarify, I was referring to the first visit to the site. So yes, I can see how this greatly reduces the vulnerability, though it doesn't completely remove it.

As an example, a rogue Apple Store employee could insert him self as a MITM between the access point and the internet connection. Anyone testing out a new laptop in the store (or logging in to their bank from a just-activated iphone) would be vulnerable, without the attacker ever having touched any of those devices.
Analysts are the people who write about subsets of the technology market for market research firms. They travel to vendors and to large companies who buy from vendors and attempt to assess the whole market; then they write these reports, which are ostensibly intended to help enterprise purchasers pick the right products (and thus easily justify 5-figure price tags).
What i don't get is why they made this one feature bundling all the new behavior, as opposed to letting you decide for yourself if you want css inheritance, auto sizing, auto targets, etc
The rest of the aphorism is: A-class people hire A-class people, but B-class people hire C-class people. Point being A-class people look for the best, B-class people look for someone further down on the food chain.
Since first emerging on the Japanese online bulletin board 4chan...

4chan is American, not Japanese.
I understand now. Thanks!
This was a design decision made long ago at Amazon. The reasoning is quite simple: If you buy a product somewhere else, or want to write a review based on the description, you should be able to share the information you want.

Not to mention you get some pretty funny fake reviews on products like the three wolf moon shirt.
i applaud the effort that demonstrates the technical chops of the coders who can wring stuff like this out of browsers, but lets be honest here, html5 games are only viable if we dramatically lower our expectations. valve and others have already created a de-facto network standard for games...the games available there are what is in fact state-of-the-art, and what you need to beat to create a truly compelling product
There are a lot of real security issues HSTS doesn't protect against. But for its miniscule cost, it does a very good job of protecting against one specific real threat.
Issues with new TLS versions
If you don't like the article, flag it and move on. Meta discussions (particularly about voting conspiracy theories) are not interesting.
Creating apps based on the availability of domain names, interesting approach, hmm.
I think you're probably right.

The biggest problem I see is storage if you hack something together. Not just raw storage, because that is an issue, but how fast you can clear the buffer and get the image to disk.
Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk for arbitrary application stacks
I was arguing a bit at the extreme, in reaction to the other extreme. No doubt some secrecy will continue, but it would be preferable if there were a lot less than there is now.
You imply that the state/military would collapse without secrecy but haven't given any concrete reason why except perhaps, "that's how it's done." Tenets also implies belief. The world is changing and people will need to adjust regardless of what they believe in.
> stuck with Firefox even as his setup was unusable to the point of needing to install a restart button add-on.

That seems hyperbole to me. As I have commented on HN several times before FF was the only full featured browser that worked for my browsing habit. I browse from a old laptop that only has 512MB of RAM. On this m/c I would keep some 300 or more tabs open for months on end, without shutting FF down or rebooting the laptop.

What I did have to do was reset the default cache sizes and some caching policy sizes, disable flash, and have an add-on that unloads the content of an idle tab. So strictly speaking I didn't have all of 300 tabs loaded in memory (but that was a good enough approximation for me).

I agree FF can hog a lot of memory, but I think it was and is eminently usable if one is willing to tweak the about:config settings a bit and install a few helpful plugins like flashblock etc.
So... this article simply isn't true.
I agree with this.
I use the similarly named:
tree style tab
it is the bees knees, tree style tabs on the left of the screen, its simple and genius. Its the reason firefox is my default browser, despite its gradual slowing as it keeps running
While this does sound interesting from a psychological/neurological perspective, I feel bad for anyone who actually tries to implement a password system based on this. 38 bits of entropy is nothing, a standard password with 38 bits of entropy would take about 5 minutes to crack (assuming a GPU that can compute 1 billion hases/second). Nevermind that by the NIST specification for human-generated passwords, a 30 character string of alphas would be 45 bits of entropy.
Also, as some others have pointed out, storing people's unique strings in the clear invalidates any strength this scheme could hope to achieve.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Human-generat...

Conclusion: Interesting psychological experiment, not actually backed by any appreciable crypto knowledge.

Edit: disregard my NIST comment, someone linked the paper used to get the 38 bit figure, http://bojinov.org/professional/usenixsec2012-rubberhose.pdf.
If you're in the UK you could do a lot worse than join the ORG[1]. Maybe non-US resident HN'ers can co-opt this thread to post their own local feline alert movements.

[1] - http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
based on this, it shouldn't take more than half a day under the worst circumstances (single EBS drive with crappy performance), and if you Raid together enough drives, you can do it in about an hour. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you pay for EBS by size, not physical disks, so the more you can split up your data in blocks, the more performance you're going to get.

http://stu.mp/2009/12/disk-io-and-throughput-benchmarks-on-a...
A close look at Etsy, Inc. financing rounds
This is a decent article, but it's really just another "use your framework to mitigate CSRF" article. There's probably been hundreds of them in the last five years. Useful for junior devs who haven't seen it before; uninteresting for most everyone else.
I guess the real lessons there for users is "don't do anything sensitive on a device that's not yours. or on one you just acquired, unless you trust every hop between you and the server". But users generally don't know/care/think about these things :)
Latency: The New Web Performance Bottleneck
I guess that would depend on your interpretation of the afterlife. There are plenty of people in the world who believe that he is still here, just on a different plane of existence...
I just noticed those jerks at American Semiconductor are charging ten dollars shipping for the $10,000,000.00 part. What a rip!
Well, my firm does research reports like this (but not quite as expensive) and that is emphatically not our business model. We set out to deliver the best information we can to whoever needs and will buy it, and there is no relationship between being a customer and getting mentioned in a report.

It probably obvious to all, but I'll just state for the record that proper research reports are expensive to put together (and often impossible for buyers to do, because industry players won't talk to each other in the same way as they will talk to analysts) and typically sell in very small volumes (from just a handful of copies through to a couple of hundred if things go well -- of course there are outliers that become huge successes too, but they are few and far between)
It would be hilarious if you could provide internet meme consulting to corporate marketing groups.

A lot of the older marketing execs are out of touch with internet culture and could just hire a consulting group to prevent future gaffes.
This is a sensationalist headline, and this is not a strong password length. Based on the information in the article, this is really equivalent to a "strong" 5-character password - not very secure.

It's not "30-character unbreakable cryptography", you can crack it in minutes on your phone or desktop.

Technical details:

The article actually says that each 'character' you learn is one of only 6 possibilties - for only 2.5 bits per character and total entropy of 38 bits.

To see how woefully little entropy this is, if you code, try writing a program that counts to 2^38 - or on a 32-bit system go through the 4.2bn possible values of an integer 64 times. That's how many possible keys there are in a 38-bit password. It really just takes minutes - certainly far less than the 45 minutes the article says it takes to learn this password!
every webgl demo i run brings my mac-pro system to its knees, and this is to run demos that would be considered state of the art for 2004. i don't see this becoming the standard deployment model for games
I personally see a lot of news that's been "forgotten" quickly, because I prefer getting the RSS feed rather than relying on the front page of HN. Of course, I get a lot of noise (submissions with only 2 points and no comments) but I still feel that I get a lot of value from them, regardless of their actual popularity.
This is the exact formula we are using for the rewrite of our poker game (http://pokerrpg.com). We are still beta testing the new poker tables, but so far they are running incredibly smoothly using no plugins, just vanilla Javascript, Node.js, and MongoDB. Glad to see these getting pushed more for games!
on-demand doesn't matter.

If lots of your infrastructure is in ec2, you may need a good db server inside ec2 that is used constantly. eg if you have a read heavy cassandra workload, you need ssds.
Do you think it's a bad approach? It's a memorable word and there's a lot of competition in this area (workout trackers), so I think a notable domain could help.
What's important is that you've found a way to feel morally superior and do nothing about the problems we face today. A true internet warrior.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analyst

In this case, IDC is a tech market research firm that has a stable of tech analyst that research and evaluate the a market and distill their work into a fancy book report. There are others like Gartner and Forrester that do something similar. Tech companies, media companies and investment banks buy these reports to keep track of the latest trends.
Forgot to say, I believe the very same PDF is available at http://www.idc.com/MarketScape/download/IDC_MarketScape_Virt...
FBI Will Leak False Papers
On the topic of courts: There is a US court case in the 11th circuit where a federal judge, in fact, ruled that people are not required to give up their encryption passwords under the 5th amendment. It isn't a supreme court case however.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/personal-data-... "Last week in San Francisco, a federal court for the first time ruled that the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — the right to not self-incriminate — protects against “forced decryption.” The judge, from the 11th Circuit in San Francisco, ruled that a Florida court violated a defendant’s rights when its Grand Jury gave him the choice to either reveal his TrueCrypt password or go to jail."
Essentially you sequence tons of short bits of dna and then either fit them together (assemble) or fit them to a reference (align). You can find example data sets in the Short Read Archive:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/

Cloudburst (a hadoop based aligner) has a good description of an algorithm:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cloudburst-bio/index.p...
Though they can get much more sophisticated and there are a number of open and closed source implementations...I only link this one because of the quality of the figure.

The data sets we work with in my group can be up 400gb's of compressed text for the reads from a single individual.

Another example from biology with a similar computational profile would be searching through a hugh number of mass spectrometer outputs to identify the components in a new sample.
"What kind of argument is that?"

Not a very strong one. I wasn't trying to argue, but rather suggest a new perspective. That out of the very few who strike it rich founding startups, there are many more who have earned a good salary and saved away a good amount of money while working their way up the corporate ladder.

"Rich" is a moving target for most people. As I noted, mine is different than most in the startup / bay area. I've been enough 3rd world countries to know what I need for comfort and happiness in my own life.

To have a few hundred $k in your bank account liquid is meaningful wealth. If you think in only sports cars and large houses, then yes... that goes quickly. If you think about it as the ability to travel, have leisure time, afford quality foods, etc. Then it is a quality of life that most in the world can't enjoy.

I agree with your last point to never do any kind of work just to get rich. Work on what you love, as a founder or employee.
I think you're failing to distinguish between companies like Gartner, who are more along the lines of what you describe (i.e. mass-market research) and other companies (like mpclark's) that have a small audience and need a lot of work to produce these reports.
I have added it to my Amazon Whish List ...
XSRF/CSRF Vulnerability Explained in Non-Geek Speak
This explains why I could never remember my locker combo, but could unlock it if you handed me the blasted thing. Same goes for pin numbers. The second I think of what the real number is I lose it...
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