skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Friendship takes repeated exposure in mundane situations."

Or, in some cases, limited exposure in exciting or trying situations. I have at least one really good friend that I met on a (in retrospect) comically terrible plane flight. I have some close friends I met on a two-week-long backpacking trip, and some that I met on a summer-long volunteering trip.

Sometimes, if the initial meeting is very memorable or intense, it can accelerate the process. I can't say for sure whether that's possible at a dinner. Unless it's a truly bizarre and memorable dinner.
I checked it today.
Actually I don't think the risk is all that high. If the sinking ship still sinks, then oh well. But, however small the chance, she manages to turn things around...
The NLA contributed to the death of a startup I worked for last year (in Edinburgh, although this is a UK-wide issue, Meltwater being an English company).

At that time, they wanted £5,000 to not sue us, at least that much again, per quarter, for access to a horrific and incomplete API, plus 12p per link per imprint.

Let me repeat that one again: they wanted 12p for every time someone saw a link to their website published by us.

And even THEN, the NLA don't actually speak for all newspapers in the UK - News International publications are not licensed, which means that there's no legal path to accessing their content.

It's complete nonsense. One friend suggested using bit.ly to shorten the URLs, paying the NLA their 12p once and letting them go after bit.ly (in America) for the rest.
It was quite clear that the only way she could move up and grow would be to either start a new company, and what would that be that after Google, or leading another huge company. Great choice, I am rooting for her, and for Yahoo.
Wow, what an incredible coup.

I've always admired her, she seems to be very smart and has her finger on the pulse on what the Internet is all about, so if anyone can turn Yahoo around it's her.

I sincerely hope she has the intestinal fortitude to do WHATEVER it takes to revitalize Yahoo. The first thing I would do is get rid of the entire board of directors, they need a complete reboot as well.
Actually, I think it's very clear there were just a lot of bad dev practices happening across the different technologies. Classic ASP on Impact Data, PHP on the main Billabong site and current day .NET on the store. Clearly bad things were done on all.

However, some of those basic injection flaws in classic ASP would not have been possible on a more modern technology stack be that from Microsoft or other. A 5 year old version of PHP also isn't going to do you any favours. Newer frameworks are simply better at saving you from yourself - but that doesn't excuse the sloppy practices.
Color me underwhelmed by Covey's writing. I always found it a bit too obvious, and found it disingenuous that while he spoke at length about the importance of religion and his large family, he never came out and stated that he was Mormon (not that there's anything intrinsically good or bad about that, but ... it's like appearing multiple times on the news as a small businessman without revealing that you're also an officer for a decidedly partisan political organization (http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/jul/13/introducing-joe-olivo/... -- no, not Covey).

His association with Darl McBride (of SCO vs. IBM lawsuit fame) doesn't particularly impress me either, in the "judge 'em by the company they keep" sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride

Covey took an obscure term from psychology and rather utterly changed its meaning. "Responsive" or "anticipatory" work fine. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proactive

Covey's book is decent. It's by no means the best. The truths it speaks are pretty obvious.

And I suppose this is my own take to his principle #2.
Are you saying that someone writing a -level renderer- that uses 35% cpu for a 13 year old video game means WebGL is ready for studio quality AAA titles?
When we talk to people about the company, the finance to women's fashion part of the story always generates a lot of questions. If other people here are in a similar spot (thinking about making a big industry change for their startup) I wanted to make that known in case they have questions as well.
Here is how I responded to Michael via Twitter:

"I don't want to move to New York because my wife and son live here with me, and we have a whole life outside of tech that matters.

The thing about imeem and picplz is they seemed really stupid and insignificant at first too. But the issues they tackled ended up being about something very important and fundamental. At least in my opinion.

imho everything worth doing looks stupid and insignificant at first: http://daltoncaldwell.com/the-makings-of-history-are-banal "

Source tweets:

https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/224947883009515521

https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/224948252141830145

https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/224948783891496960
Hm. If you must do that, remember Postgres is guilt-free-SQL, so don't use a varchar, use the array type.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/arrays.html
I bet that there's no measurable difference in this code. It just bugs me to see so much unnecessary complication based on blindly imitating an optimization that maybe made sense 20 years ago.
My code is not on Github because it is proprietary code, so unfortunately I can't send you a link to have a look at it.

Sure, encryption without authentication is worthless, but what if I want to do the authentication in a different manner? What if I want to encrypt using AES-128/CTR-BE and then sign using public/private key rather than using an HMAC(SHA-256). That choice can be left up to a developer. Also, there still seems to be some debate as to whether you encrypt then HMAC or if you HMAC then encrypt. (I personally prefer encrypt then HMAC).

I don't think you necessarily have to have the developer provide the IV, you can provide a way for the developer to get the generated IV back from the system after the fact that would work just as well. So long as you can get access to it, so you can build it to spec. All this hiding is good for projects where that is possible, interoperability and following gov't requirements can throw a wrench in simply using something like Keyczar.

The biggest issue with DH that we have had to overcome is the different encodings that may be used. You have various different standards for how to share the DH keys. There is an ANS X9 standard that is recommended by the government[1] (and required in our product) and then there is PKCS3.

The biggest issue we ran into is that Java (on Android) only does PKCS3, and Botan doesn't by default decode that so you end up having to implement that functionality yourself. We ended up using PKCS3 but that will most likely have to be changed for gov't approval which means we need to get Java to grok ANS X9.

When doing DH I also suggest using one of the NIST approved DH groups and not generating your own.

Do note that none of this is using a custom DH implementation, it is using the stuff that is available in Botan/Java itself, the biggest issue is finding common ground for finishing the DH key exchange because of the different formats used in the in-between steps.

Also, generating a random key from the DH data is different on various different API's. Botan can generate keys for you, and will use a KDF for you, while Java will simply give you the bytes back in raw format.

So far this isn't a solved problem for us. Since we are not using it for cryptographic purposes we may end up doing our own custom implementation so that we have less to worry about in terms of encoding/decoding various different storage schemes. And any weakness in the system won't be a fatal flaw that could be used/exploited in a meaningful manner, so fixing things at a later date won't be catastrophic.

The biggest issue is that there are so many standards and so many little variations of it in cryptography that trying to get systems to interoperate and work together is a massive undertaking and each time you run up against a wall because something is abstracted away you wish and eventually want access to the lower level primitives.

[1]: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-56A/SP800-56A...
I think this is pretty standard. Yahoo clearly needs a permanent CEO yesterday.
This might be a stupid question, but are there any amazing turnaround stories in the world of large tech companies? If not, is that due to the relative youth of the sector, or something fundamental? I can think of a ton of companies that have faltered, but really none that have made a dramatic turnaround.
Sure, there isn't really an enforceable non-compete in California, its one of the things that makes Silicon Valley, well Silicon Valley. Second there is a sort of hubris around 'the best revenge is beating them at their own game.' I know of at least two founder/co-founder pairs that split over different ideas about how the vision should go and rather than try to sue the other out of existence, the sense of invulnerability or desire for competition gives rise to a sort of 'bring it on if you got it' mentality.
This will play out much like Armstrong at AOL. Lots of flailing around, another attempt at altering Yahoo's trajectory, and ultimately a further devalued company (not specifically because of anything Mayer will do, but because there's nothing that can stop Yahoo's erosion).

At some point the conclusion needs to be reached that the core of Yahoo is the problem. The products that generate the bulk of their sales are at best stagnant with no growth left, and at worst are slowly collapsing. Once that's properly digested, the company then needs to be blown apart and liquidated to the highest bidders.

Maybe there's a smaller core that could be focused on as a source of innovation and growth, but it's definitely not what makes up the bulk of Yahoo's $20 billion market value. If the goal is to generate shareholder value, Mayer should focus on getting her hands around an engine of growth that she can really add value to; a smaller Yahoo where she can drive a few growth products (assuming those can be found first). So much of what Yahoo does is maintaining a flat-lined late 1990s group of products.
I thought this was a great idea. But I simply am an idiot and can't figure out how to use it. They tell you to type these || characters and it always spits back a fail when I try it. They need more user testing feedback.
Ms. Mayer resigned from Google on Monday afternoon by telephone.

That must have been an interesting call (to Larry?) to make...
One company that started doing this same thing several years ago is Gengo (formerly MyGengo):

gengo.com

They offer a translation API for skilled human translations. I've never used it, but they've got a very nice API and many related plugins and libraries.
Though this is because they're storing an ID to check against and not anything inherent in the hashing or data structure which makes it not only the opposite of a bloom filter but rather different in spirit too.
There's a reason he's desperate to stay in Denmark...
Apple kind of leaps to mind.

This is where they were the year Jobs returned, remember: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/wired+cover.jpg
There are some new features. Since Office already does everything people need it to do, most of the new features streamline common workflows. Outlook should be a lot nicer to use, even though Office 2010 already has more features than most people will ever use. Excel: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/first-... Outlook: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/first-... Word: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/first-...
One in Five Microsoft Logins in Hands of Hackers
And if she had stayed at Google, what would be the next step for her career-wise? She went from vice president of search products to overseeing location and local services. Now she's CEO. You don't think that'll motivate her?
My app TerraTracker has gone open source. What now?
This is journalism, though, not science. The point isn't to answer the question, just to document the controversy. Apple says one thing. Another party with relevant qualifications says that they are wrong. And the subject has previously been covered in the media, so it's newsworthy. They even contacted Apple for a response. I don't see anything weird here at all.

I will say, though, that if Apple truly felt their glue allows for easy disassembly, they probably wouldn't have withdrawn from EPEAT in the first place.
I read that as Trapped
Marissa Mayer Will Be Yahoo’s New CEO
Illustrator has plenty of numerical errors all around to warrant Photoshop design for perfectionists.
Was Yahoo ever an engineering-focused company?

http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/07/its-official-yahoo-is-a-med...
This is a very good point, and one I think the author completely missed.

I use bloom filters in an application at work and was very interested to hear about this, wondering if some sort of hybrid might be useful. But when I saw that the hash map was storing the actual objects, I immediately dismissed the idea for my use case - we can't afford to store anything more than a handful of bits. (Our bloom filters set between 9 and 11 bits per signature.)

The key advantage to bloom filters is that the represent set identity lookups (albeit in an adjustable lossy false-positive way). They do not, however, store actual sets of data. They must be coupled with a storage mechanism (traditionally with a several-order-of-magnitude slower lookup speed than the bloom filter) to actually store the items contained within the set - the bloom filter is just a way of definitively answering the question "Could this set possibly contain this item?"
When I look back at the younger people I've helped hire, the biggest success factor was not necessarily whether he/she had been dedicated to school, per se. It was more important that they had dedicated themselves to something. A good grade from a good school is a nice indicator of that dedication, but it isn't the only indicator. It doesn't matter if a person is a misfit in one or two areas, but someone that dropped out of everything they tried generally didn't perform well for us, either. Looking back, I suppose it meant that those people were still casting about for their true calling.
Because they change the world.

Which retroactively gets them assigned 'misfit' status, as a sort of honorary name. Franklin, Churchill, Einstein, Noether and Darwin, to name just a few, all weren't misfits. They were simply eminently capable people that believed in themselves. You don't need to be a misfit to achieve greatness and we don't need to call everyone that achieves greatness a misfit.
I don't think it's completely off topic. I'm not trying to be snarky, but he says "The world doesn’t need a slightly better Twitter, just as the world doesn’t need a slightly better ad model." as he writes on his slightly better blogging platform. I think there's always room for new and improved versions of existing services, but they just have to stand out and have the community behind them to succeed.
Ummm isn't it the board of directors that hires the CEO?
This is just brilliant news for Yahoo. Much as they have become a figure of ridicule in Silicon Valley, I have hoped year after year to see a Yahoo resurgence. This is finally a real chance at a turnaround.

Of course now we have to see if potential acquirers (particularly those going up against Google) suddenly see Yahoo as a much better target if they can get Mayer in the deal. (MS, FB, I'm looking at you!)
Respectfully what risk does she have? She has a tremendous history with Google, even if Yahoo tanks with her at the helm, she could probably continue in at least a Senior Vice President position with almost any other company of her choosing.

Not to mention she is more-then-likely financially taken-care of. At that point, 'risk' is almost negligible. It's all just 'more possibilities' for Mrs. Mayer.
In addition to his books and organizers he also had 52 grand-children! That's one birthday per week, on average.
Yes, I am aware. The point of my comment is that Wikipedia obviously does not block wget.
I've hated everything Office for years. Every single piece of software they offer has a much more powerful (and free) open sourced alternative. I don't see any of this crap changing my mind any time soon.
Smart Developer Network (Tech in the Philippines)
Dang, not a tribute to Danzig and Company.
So don't tell us how to use the primitives, tell us in high level overview of common mistakes that are made so that we can watch out for those. Some of us simply don't have the luxury of using Keyczar.

You are well respected when it comes to the field of crypto in this community, you have a lot of knowledge that comes with that, and I believe sharing that knowledge would be more beneficial than just saying "Use Keyczar". Sometimes that one tool just doesn't fit the bill and or can't be used due to contractual obligations/constraints. Even if you are not confident to make a recommendation of how to use OpenSSL securely you can at least say "These are the top 5 mistakes I see" and "Typing A-E-S into your code" can be on that list, but it isn't very constructive.
False positives are possible but rare due to hash collisions

When there is a collision you check to see if the object living there is the one you're trying to store. If it's not then you assume negative. If it is the object you're checking then it's positive but it's a correct positive.

If it's not the object you're checking then you evict the object living there and put in the one you're checking, thus allowing the one you evicted to cause a false negative again.

The whole system works BECAUSE of intentional collisions. If there were no collisions it would just be a hashmap and you'd have unbounded data structure size.
or hstore https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/3/14/introducing_...
"...hit their data caps more quickly on their mobile plan merely because they are downloading more pixels."

Surely the caps will increase in size as a consequence of improved mobile-data-pushing-technologies and to keep up with the need, just like the speeds of broadband-connections have since they were introduced?
Thanks for the reply. Its great to know that networking and meeting developers at meet ups can lead to partnerships. I will be looking out for these events in my area. I'm working as a IB analyst at the moment, so I'm always a bit worried about meeting the tech side. Thanks!
Learn keyboard shortcuts, work faster
Apple is a good example. Keep in mind that Apple was "turned around" by one of the founders. That's an example of re-aligning the company with it's original vision rather than altering the vision. I think the latter is much harder but I've never tried.
"I agree with Microsoft’s assessment that WebGL is a severe security risk. The gfx driver culture is not the culture of security." -- John Carmack

And Carmack is not precisely known as a MS cheerleader.
> Perhaps the game should be to transform one block of code into something different in as few keystrokes as possible.

Related, http://vimgolf.com/ but vim-specific..
When does Yahoo's contract with Microsoft for the search engine expire? 2014? I think she will quickly switch to Google search engine after that. And there goes half of Bing's market share.
Google has to sue Yahoo!, right? She has to be walking away with trade secrets for local and search.
So she was head of Search at Google at one point right?

I wonder what it would be like to become CEO of a company who has outsourced their whole search and advertising stack to Bing.

Will Yahoo! start caring about search or ads again?
I share the sentiment. Are there any good code readers? Something that could show better what actually lies in your code better than highlighted text does?
I wonder what advice Michael Dell has for Yahoo.
Dunbar's number is an upper limit. What's the lower limit?
Easy solution: Use an external monitor to verify things still look good at 1x.
Yeah, but statistically even the loyal sausage dog would have a better than average chance of having moved on since the ASP launch! (10 years ago avg age would have been < 10 years)
Apple passed through a pretty dramatic shift on the Sculley/Spindler years... AOL is another example, if I'm not mistaken.
Doug Crockford gave a great keynote address at the HTML5 conf this year titled "What would Crockford do?" It was basically not about HTML5 and all about what he'd do if he were Yahoo CEO.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cukFl7gpjE (Crockford takes the stage ~5:09 )
Would you care to elaborate more on the different cultures both as individual entities and in direct comparison to each other?
> It's funny how it seems obvious when you read it, but sometimes we need someone else to summarize and restate the obvious to look at it clearly and objectively.

This brings to mind one of my favorite Covey quotes:

"What is common sense is not always common practice."
Did you seriously just compare the CEO position at Yahoo to a _start-up_? To think the two are even in the same zip code, much less the same ballpark, is just, well it reflects a rather isolated viewpoint, put it that way. Yahoo is a $19B corporation.
Thank you for the positive attitude. Most comments here are focused on how much of a challenge this is for her and why would she leave security for something that could possibly become bigger. Well, maybe she wants something bigger in life. Can that be possible?
Especially given that Larry has lost his voice.
Yeah, I don't think many people would pay for something like that.

Katango basically provided that service for free, but they got acquired by Google. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/google-acquires-katango-the...
Marissa is one of the few people that can give Yahoo! any sort of chance at success.

I wish her luck.
Thanks for responding, Dalton. I really appreciate it.

Responses to the responses below :)

"can't argue with that :) meant Valley v. New York more as ideas than places, but you should at least come visit for inspiration

I actually agree with that :) I like the Paul Graham line that many huge startups start off as "toys"

seriously best of luck with http://app.net , I don't want to come off as a dick

I just find the idea of crusading against ad-supported models with an awesome team inspiring, but not necessarily the api idea"

Source tweets:

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958061226360832

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958718230544387

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958289140658176

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958976733888512
Look at it from this angle: if she succeeds, she could be wildly successful (Steve Jobs return-style).

If she fails, could anyone fault her?

I see no outsized downsides for her here - she either succeeds or Yahoo continues to fail. For Yahoo, this is a high-profile CEO who, if the board gives enough maneuvering space, might prevent the free-fall and establish a stable flight.
YIM: Yahookia In Motion
"Like loneliness or stress or sickness or unemployment or high prices or lack of education."

I actually experienced this first hand recently while on a long trip spanning multiple cities in the US and Canada. People seemed to have a very different set of problems/concerns on top of their minds outside of SV. It was weird at first, but then it became very refreshing. I am not a New Yorker and will dare make the same comment as Michael Waxman (disclosure: Michael is a friend) - step outside SV and people's problems switch away from Socialcam vs Viddy to I can't make my mortgage, I'm getting sick, our kids won't move out etc.