skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is terrible. Though, I don't understand why anyone would turn on a "find my Mac" feature that has the potential to wipe your entire hard drive remotely unless you have thorough backups. Time machine is dead easy to use; try pluging in a usb hard drive and it will ask you if you want to use this as a backup drive. Arc is something that anyone on the mac should use as well for backing up priceless pictures and files. It encrypts the files locally and then sends them to your amazon S3 bucket as a backup. Easy and cheap too as you are only charged what you backup at the S3 rate(as of now it's ~0.125/GB/Month +a very small amount for put and get requests).
Two-factor authentication is a good step, a better one is to completely outsource authentication to a third-party single sign-on provider (Google, Facebook, Twitter). It's a little more work upfront than a standard username/password box, but you get out of a ton of annoying hassles by doing this, including email verification, account suspension, enforcing password rotation/complexity, and building two-factor authentication flows into your app.
I'm not from the US, but doesn't F have a different meaning than A-D? I.e. it means you failed and have to do the test/project/whatever again?

A-E is logical I'd say.
Presumably, you have been doing something with your life these last 39 years. I would venture to say your best bet is to take the experience you have in what ever field you were previously in, combine it with your new found programming knowledge and build something.
The trouble with two-factor authentication is that it tends to be a nucleus around which a monoculture of security procedure forms. It is convenient to have a single sign-on that is believed to be beyond reproach, even if that sign on is a bit more obnoxious than the old username + password combo.

Until your two-factor system gets hacked, as happened to RSA: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/the-rsa-hack-how-th...

The more common a security system is, the more attractive a target it is for professional (organized crime) hackers to attack.
Some of these are a bit too terse. e.g. 500px says "Ownership". What does that mean? And why is it less worrying than twitpic's "Takes credit for your content"? (And how does that make sense? Twitpic puts the username of the uploader on each page, no?)
This confirms my suspicion that the best time to post the articles I find is on Monday.
>Not having to be tied to the Apple ecosystem.

Except that you'll then be tied to the Microsoft ecosystem. It's like changing the contractor for your soul from Satan to Lucifer.
"the extra screen real estate will have a widget bar, showing things like the weather or stock price"

I highly doubt it. That would be very un-Apple. I think there are a lot of legacy apps that will scale automatically to utilize the extra height, or there will just be a little black bar above/below the legacy app, so the app takes up the same amount of vertical pixels that it used to.
Exactly. Let me know if you find an answer to this.

I have a policy where I will only add a generated application-specific password to really trusted applications (internal OS apps mail, calendar etc), and have gone as far as to sniff all traffic for each of these apps.
Compared to the other things we're talking about, fraud on credit cards is largely a solved problem. (Yes, there are issues, and I'm sure people actively working on the problem don't consider it solved.) Credit card fraud puts out the consumer $50 at most.

But someone got the bright idea to attach other things to your credit card information, like your entire MacBook.

We need to burn down the entire concept of "security questions" and start over from scratch.
When you perform a remote hard drive wipe on Find my Mac, the system asks you to create a four-digit PIN so that the process can be reversed. But here’s the thing: If someone else performs that wipe — someone who gained access to your iCloud account through malicious means — there’s no way for you to enter that PIN.

That sounds more like remote encryption to me. And a four digit PIN is easy to brute force (assuming that it isn't asking apple for the decryption key once entered (which means you need internet access do reverse it)).
"We thought we were endorsing Hadoop, our bad", says France.
I heard about this hack too (http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-four-critical-security-flaws-...), but I disagree with you - the last 4 CC digits should be considered non-identifying.

First, let me explain a little bit of background on this "hack". From the article, they had 4 problems with their process that allowed them to get hacked badly:

1. AT&T was tricked into redirecting my voicemail to a fraudulent voicemail box;

2. Google's account recovery process was tricked by the fraudulent voicemail box and left an account recovery PIN code that allowed my personal Gmail account to be reset;

3. A flaw in Google's Enterprise Apps account recovery process allowed the hacker to bypass two-factor authentication on my CloudFlare.com address; and

4. CloudFlare BCCing transactional emails to some administrative accounts allowed the hacker to reset the password of a customer once the hacker had gained access to the administrative email account.

I'm not really sure what #3 is and #4 is irrelevant to our discussion, so I'll concentrate on points #1 and #2.

From #1, it follows that the attackers were able to obtain the phone number associated with the two factor auth. How did this work? My assumption is that it was a very targeted attack.

The article starts the attack at June 1st, 2012, but I believe (read: assume) that the attackers probably met the target of the attack beforehand and obtained his/her business card (with a cellphone number), which allowed them to perform #1 above.

So, given that this attack required a physical piece of paper (i.e. a business card) to be acquired from the target, it is not a stretch of imagination to say that if another attacker wanted to obtain the last 4 digits of someone's credit card, all they need to do is follow the person to a restaurant or gas station and get a payment receipt -- every receipt has the last 4 digits written on it. Some have the first four.

Therefore, I don't believe it was Amazon's fault for assuming the last 4 digits are non-identifying, but rather Apple's fault for assuming they are. To be clear, hindsight is 20/20, so I think it was relatively reasonable for Apple to assume that. However, I do expect Apple to change this policy in the future.
I've never understood this so called 'talent war' There's millions of people unemployed in this country, why not find which ones of them know basic skills like math and science and train them in house to write python or java or whatever? Or if your companies to lazy to train people then pay high enough salaries so these people go train themselves. I think its fine to bring in a few extra smart immigrants to provide a different perspective but lets be reasonable, ordinary Americans built this country and they're the reason Silicon Valley exists in this country and not someplace else. If there's a lack of talent then I think CEOs should reinvest in ordinary Americans and not take these shortcuts. You could easily teach someone to code by October 2013 if you started now.
I noticed that it's under the AGPL. That might be an issue for developing a Chrome plugin.
Yeah, but the navigation and UI paradigm they've inherited from being an X-Box project originally kinda sux...

It's really hard to use on apple tv with the remote. So very unintuitive. And they are also heavily invested in their theme engine - we'll have an "android-looking theme" at best, not native UI...
+1. Really looking forward to it.
For business use, how many apps do you need? They're going to sell it to enterprise users by Microsoft Office, which is a safer bet for interoperability than Numbers/Pages/Keynote on an iPad. Apple beats them handily in number of 99¢ games and Instagram clones, but it's much more even in the areas that matter in enterprise.

And how often do you need to ask a geek a question about an iPad? There isn't much of a learning curve, and anybody who has owned one can probably answer most questions. Hopefully (I haven't used it myself) the Win8 tablets are similar in that regard. In my opinion, it'll mostly depend on whether they do the 8-levels-deep-control-panel and features with no visible interface (like the desktop's start menu and sidebar).
Canopy Labs (YC S12) Unveils A Self-Serve Approach To Customer Modeling
When you perform a remote hard drive wipe on Find my Mac, the system asks you to create a four-digit PIN so that the process can be reversed. But here’s the thing: If someone else performs that wipe — someone who gained access to your iCloud account through malicious means — there’s no way for you to enter that PIN.

From: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona...

But ultimately, if the attacker has the ability to remote wipe/encrypt your device he/she is probably in control of any keys required to undo it.
But why? Genuine question. What has quora done that is block worthy? Matt cuts made a video on google webmasters channel on why expertexchangd is not blocked. I am on phone so cant paste link. You should check it out.
Want to build a successful business? Date consumers but marry businesses.
The ebay of art, and a small business web manager.

And both are going to be awesome!
already discussed here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346507
Yes, Fail is right. Seems appropriate here too. I agree with the OP, A-F would work better.
Even better: for years Barnes & Noble bought out the contract of every location that Borders tried to open in NYC, and opened a B&N there for the exact same reason -- and also to keep Borders out of NYC. In the rest of the country they did the open-across-the-street trick whenever possible.

Of course, Borders went on to screw the pooch all by itself later, but that's a different story.
What do you trust for email? I sleep a lot better knowing it's Google and Time Warner or Comcast. Collocation? I wonder how hard it is to talk a colo facility into access to an arbitrary rack.
The Windows 8's Metro UI is fundamentally designed for a touch screen based tablet, bad things will happen if MS pushes desktop users to use that UI.

Really don't want Win 8 to fall, my soon-in-beta new text editor (with a Firebug-like UI, called LIVEditor) is designed for Windows only...
congrats David! (all the way from Singapore :) )

Dave + Dave = World Domination!
tl;dr: Anytime you find yourself making an assumption, stop. Educate yourself on that assumption and then move on.

I had a very similar problem when it came to learning. I am very fast at picking things up, so I often skim and assume certain things based on context. This has caused me several problems especially related to large projects and some implementation details. However, I have found a very effective way of getting around it.

When I am reading something and I see something that I can define by the context, I make a point of at least wiki'ing/googling the point in question.

For example, I was doing some embedded Linux stuff and working with some IO using sysfs. I could do what I needed and had a general understanding of how sysfs worked (based on context/assumption). However, once I learned up on sysfs and how it was implemented, it gave me a much greater understanding of what I was doing with the IO and how I should handle it according to my end goal.
I think CEOs should reinvest in ordinary Americans and not take these shortcuts. You could easily teach someone to code by October 2013 if you started now.

What startup is going to wait over a year for their prospective coder to be able to do his job? This is something the education system should be doing. If it isn't, by all means fix it, but don't make startup CEOs spend over a year training employees.
Great points! It comes down to how deep you want to go, too. Programmers are still finding jobs, and it seems like our market is better than most hiring markets, at least in the United States. So if you just want a job programming: they're out there.

If you want to be a real hacker, though, (Why else would you be here?) you need to be a little crazy, and obsess over the deep details of your specialty.
While checking this out I wondered whether there exists a service for generating ToS. Does that exist?
Another way to look at it, skilled immigration gets the US educated workers subsidized by foreign tax payers. If they line up a job, they step foot on US soil being a tax payer, in both sales tax and income tax. A net benefit to the US.
No it's not better. If one'e Google Account get hacked. hacker can access all the sites, including yours.
SSO offers good UX but not the security.
I'm sure your right in many ways, but I'm talking about the day that I had a choice between a 50 cent game (up from 25 which I was fine with) to a $1+ game in the same arcade on the same day, not over time. The $1+ game did not seem to be twice the fun. Then one day the 50 cent game was gone and all I had to choose from were the more expensive machines.

At that point I stopped going.

Granted, this is my experience and should be taken as such.
Your 24% number is grossly misleading. Quoting your source:

[...] Estimate of ethnic
entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley was obtained by identifying all businesses with CEOs having Chinese and Indian surnames in a Dun & Bradstreet database of technology firms started since 1980. According to this count, close to one-quarter (24 percent) of Silicon Valley’s
technology firms in 1998 had Chinese or Indian executives.

Technology company executives are salaried employees - even at C-level, they do not create tech jobs any more than the HR department. Moreover, it's a well-known fact that C-level executives rarely come from founders (example: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/29/why-startup-fou...). Not to mention that an ethnically Indian/Chinese person is not the same as an immigrant from India/China.

If there are qualified Americans who can fill these jobs already, why exactly do we have a talent shortage in tech?

Because "we" don't pay enough? Because "we" won't look at anyone over 35? Because "we" demand a statistically improbable combination of skills plus open-source experience plus hobby projects? Because "we" equate talent with blogging? The list goes on and on.

(FWIW, I am an immigrant).
I think the better advice is to completely decouple your authentication from your web app, and then add two-factor authentication to that.

We use Kerberos/LDAP at work so are able to use CoSign to provide web SSO. I did a quick write-up about a service that I wrote which allows me to use Google Authenticator as an additional factor with CoSign: http://it.isevil.org/blog/2011/11/13/authentication-service-...

Since it's just a Sinatra app, the web service could be used by other things. We also use it with FreeRADIUS so our users can use their second factor on the web and in their VPN client.
I don't think so, Windows is a well known brand. The average consumer won't be oblivious to them, I can understand it taking time for my grandmother to learn about it, but for people who actively use technology daily, they'll learn a lot about it quickly. There's a ridiculous number of Win8 touch screen devices coming to market this fall (something in the 30-40 devices range). Since every hardware manufacturer is going to be pushing it, it's going to become well known quickly. When the world's largest ecosystem pushes a new product, it tends to work.

I feel that people who keep comparing Win 8 to vista really have no idea what Win 8 even is. The quality bar is very high. I believe it'll do well.
Erm... I am not getting any "spectacles" and I am not logged in. I don't even have an account with Quora.

Here's what I see - http://imgur.com/m9G1Q

What am I missing?
The problem with H1-B is not the limit; the main problem is its abuse. Indian body shops like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro etc. continue to abuse H1-B visas. These companies work like a huge recruitment and immigration agency.

There are thousands of employees of these companies sitting idle in India with a H1-B visa in hand. They won’t go to work in US anytime soon because their Indian employer doesn’t need them move to US. These companies blindly apply for thousands of visas even when they don’t need it, just in case they get a new client.

These body shops waste most of the H1-B quota and create a block for genuine recruits by companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft.

The worst offenders are the downright fraudulent organizations like http://www.ebsolutionsinc.com . Does it look like a company who needs to import thousands of IT workers every year? This company alone accounts of thousands of H1-B visas every year, and there are thousands of shell companies like these. These companies are not only abusing the system, but what they are doing is downright illegal.

This is how they work:

They hold immigration seminars all over India and assure people a job in US and H1-B visa. They recruit thousands of candidates in India and charge them a fee of $8,000 to $20,000 upfront. These candidates are not only engineers; they are IT workers (who can’t code), teachers, accountants and nurses. Most of these candidates are not qualified enough, many have fake degrees and most can’t speak even speak English.

Their visas are sponsored by their shell recruitment agencies in US (supported with fake documents). These candidates do not even have a real job offer yet; the recruitment agency produces a fake job offer and keeps them on their own payroll.
Upon approval of H1-B visa, these candidates arrive in US with no clue about what comes next. Their recruiters throw them in dorms with miserable living conditions. The recruitment agency trains them some English and Interview 101 and arranges several interviews in US companies.

The American companies contract these workers from the recruitment agents, usually at 50% of the market salary. These workers start working for the American corporations, but they stay on the payroll of their recruiters. Their recruitment agents usually take a cut of 30%-50% from their salary every month.

[Edit]

One of my friend runs a body shop in US and imports around 400 workers every year.

Word 'camps' changed to 'dorms'.

Related links:

http://em.gmnews.com/news/2008-06-18/front_page/008.html

http://bhartiads.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Medical-Ou...
Although the page clearly demonstrates some specific capabilities, that doesn't count when you are expressing the wrong kind of sentiment. That is pretty amazing.
Microsoft is screwing over its customers like this.

Apple is screwing over its customers like this.

Both of them are pushing the tabletification of computing. I see how that works for the vast majority of users, but it isn't really for me. Sadly, the workstation companies have mostly died out. Sure, you can probably get a PA-RISC machine from HP or a POWER box from IBM, but those are mostly servers for the legacy market.
Chicago SEO Workshop By Brick Marketing
This is awesome! It would be cool if this could be turned into a browser plugin so you could see what class site you're visiting.
I always have mitigated feelings about these tools. On the one hand, those features are really appealing. On the other hand, leaving my regular editor prevents me from using its (sometimes heavily configured) text- and code-editing capabilities. Plus I can access all the code I've written for other projects from Emacs, regardless of the language.
China Consolidates the Rare Earth Industry and Builds Strategic Reserves
I like the simplicity of your feedback form.
But is there a reason for not having the feedback form for non-registered users ? Maybe spam?
All contact links are just email@ links
I think "Security questions" need to be completely destroyed and the earth salted. Then we have a long talk about them before bringing them back in a very careful, limited format.

Bank Of America is horrible in this. First off, if someone else tries to log in using your username 3 times, it locks you out of your account. You need access to your email to get back in.

But it demands you re-create three security questions after that. I chose a simple username so other people stumble across it a lot. So I have to go through this process frequently, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

How securely are they storing this PII? Probably not at all. I try to give the exact same questions and answers every time to limit what BoA knows about me, but someone compromising by BoA account might be able to learn that information and use it to cascade attacks into other services. (They display by secret questions and their answers to me in plaintext.)
Somewhat of a shameless plug here: Basho is having conference in October called RICON. It's in San Francisco, and it's two days dedicated to Riak, developers, and distributed systems in production. And there will be plenty of chatter about Riak 1.2 (and 1.3).

http://basho.com/community/ricon2012/
I love the color coding, makes it easy to see at a glance.

What's the plan as terms of service change over time? Some greens might become redundant.
it's something that engineers/technical people never ever understand. You can not classify people on some db just to do something not done.
Thrust implies that you're pushing off of something. For a propeller say on a helicopter, you're pushing off a column of air that "sits" on the ground. In space, thrust typically means you're pushing against gas you're providing in the form of burnt fuel. I have no clue how solar energy could create true thrust in a vacuum.
If you click on "Read the Details", you will see a bit of text under each point.

Ownership: The copyright license you grant to 500px is transferable and sublicensable. The copyright license is limited for use “in connection with the Services” which includes promotional uses and redistribution “to other parties, web-sites, applications, and other entities” if you are credited properly. The license on your content terminates when you remove such content.
Validating User Input for your Web and Mobile Apps on the Server Side
> corporations will switch to whatever platform provides this support better

Being a better Windows than Windows is hard. Companies are tied to the Microsoft legacy they committed themselves to - account management, desktop policy enforcement, Sharepoint... It's not just running VB apps better than Windows. The problem is much, much larger.

For corporations, building web apps and running them on non-Windows infrastructure is a good first step to free themselves from the whims of Microsoft, but it's only a first step. Freedom doesn't come for free, specially after you already lost it.
The WP7 app ecosystem is pretty all encompassing. It has over 100k apps and you can find anything you want in there.

It is missing some big names like instagram, but the fact that many of the major app names have decided to adopt WP7 should also stand for something.
Cache of the titans: SSD storage accelerators from Intel and Corsair face off
If you discover you love programming, then you're all set - all will follow from there.

If you don't, then you may be wasting your time.

If you're not sure, keep going until you are.
My friend and I believe that this is part of Quora's A/B testing.

(I got the blur, while my friend could see everything.)
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Hey Walter/Rodrigo. We interacted with Shopify a lot building Wishery and I agree, they're a great "role model" as startups go. Their API is well thought-out and I found interacting with Tobi to get Wishery approved was a very enjoyable process.