skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been continuing to work on this through the night. Initial benchmarking on EC2 show you can test SRP passwords at a rate of ~180k / sec on c1.xlarge, at $0.66/hr per instance.

Particularly with Blizzards strange 'case-insensitive alphanumeric only' policy, anything less than truly random 8+ character passwords are within reach.

For 90% of their users, this spells trouble. If you've seen John the Ripper, you know 'dictionary-targetable' is an increasingly ambiguous term.

My main point is that Blizzard is coming out and saying in their press release: "We use Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) to protect these passwords, which is designed to make it extremely difficult to extract the actual password"

And in their FAQ: "Cryptographically scrambled versions of passwords for North American players were accessed, protected by Secure Remote Password (SRP) protocol.... The added layer of protection from SRP makes that process computationally very difficult and expensive."

When what they SHOULD be saying is, "we used industry standard best practices, but even so the majority of the passwords have most likely already been cracked. Please make sure you change them immediately."

It would be nice if I could still tweak the title at this point.
I was thinking the same. My dad died when I was 2 years old and reading this makes me realize that I never had the sort of guidance through life Danielle seem to have had.

So, I'm sitting here sipping my first coffee of the day and have a huge feeling of being directionless. Maybe the blog post was "drivel" to some here, but not to me.
I was working as a restaurant manager part time while at uni. One of the other managers thought it great fun to staple the back of my shirt without knowing, so when I got home I had a torn shirt.

That weekend, I fired up a 286 someone had given to me, coded up a mock-DOS environment, got the main manager on-side and left it set up for the next morning. Next day...:

Start computer, get coffee. Type "win" (for Windows). Get 2000 random ascii characters with an error message. Typing "dir" produced an empty C:\ drive called "F* You Francois". Anything you did pretty much got you "bad command or file name". Your manager (who is in on it) is shouting at you to get the computer going because his restaurant is starting up. You're typing out "F* You Francois" as a password, looking for bits of paper around the office, trying to restart the computer but having the autoexec.bat put you back into it.

After about 2 hours, main manager types "fix", and the rest of your day continues, but with much added mockery.

It wasn't particularly sophisticated, but I truly loved that :) Lessons were learned.

We did something similar at school. Mocked up the Turbo Pascal UI with menus and everything, but was a bit...uh, erratic. Unfortunately the teacher knew exactly who it was and came storming into our next class :)
It seems very subjective (and somewhat arbitrary) to assign labels of "conservative" or "liberal" to languages based largely on type safety. If this random blog post is taken as the definitive source of "conservative" vs "liberal" we get the following:

Twitter and Tumblr using Scala are "Hardcore conservative", while guys writing assembler for IBM mainframes are "Batshit liberal" ?
Could this work in space or on other planets. I'd imagine this is the kind of tech that the military and NASA would be all over! If you could neatly pack the contents of your moon base and ship it ahead by a day.

Or even the military leave this just off the coast of some less than favourable country.

Great for setting up observation and living areas in hostile environments

Sealab anyone?

Edited: stupid iOS autocorrect
>> Only applicable when you produce a small, predictable volume of logging.

No, It's primarily in the larger log volume systems we run into this problem. Take a FIX session adapter (very common software in the financial services world), baseline is around 5Gb/hour but its susceptible to fairly extreme fluctuation.

When you roll the logs at say 500Mb, there's the chance our monitoring system misses an error in the tail of the previous log as the logs roll (which could in the worst cases mean loosing a couple of million or even more).

Multiple logfiles for a day are harder to search through when handling the most common use case for log files, which is not debugging but ops staff answering questions on 'what happened with X?'

What benefits does a split logfile provide? The one use case is transferring logs across the network. However most log management systems already split large logs up before transferring to the archive silo.

You're loosing a lot, but gaining nothing with split logs.

>> When logging high volumes

It makes no difference, when the market swings you're going to need an extra 200Gb anyway, whether the logs are in chunks or not. In large volume apps deleting to make space is often not an option - you're logging in high volumes for a reason (often regulatory).

>> fetching an arbitrary header from the right file for a given context can be rather painful.

That's been a solved problem for a very long time. Just as recombining a separate trace log with a main app log based on time stamp is a solved problem. I believe this highlights the bigger problem, you can go to university or a.n. other school and learn to be a developer. Where can you go to learn operations? The net result is people come up with the own solutions each time instead of building on work already done. That work is available but its often passed on by word of mouth. Surprisingly hard even in today's world to find decent blogs on ops work (thankfully there are more around now).

>> When a serious error occurs then as much context as feasible must be provided

Yes this is the extraordinarily rare case where stack traces can be useful. They still don't belong in the main app log though.

Push to a separate trace log and recombine on the fly when you need to view. The benefits are to the ops team and the monitoring system.

Another approach not often mentioned is black box logging. Log to a circular buffer in memory, the first bytes of the buffer are set to a pattern that can be searched for in a core dump, the remainder is used as a circular buffer. It's fast to log to, takes no disk space and provides crucial context in the event of a crash.

Im not sure I'll be able to convince you based on your tone, but speaking from experience, you are making the most common mistakes.
Sorry about the typos, I have fixed most of them and I am still reviewing. I was very close to chickening out and not publishing this at all, so I went for it before it was perfect. I wanted to get past the point of no return. Not a great excuse but it is the truth. I'm sorry you had to struggle through the unpolished version
Yegge:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yegge

"A measurement of length of a piece of writing, particularly when indicating a length excessive for the genre. A Yegge is approximately 4000 words or 25 kilobytes.

Named for well known programmer and technical blogger Steve Yegge, whose blog up to about 2009 was notorious for entries of approximately 1 or 2 Yegges in length, vastly exceeding the typical length of blog entries in the genre."
Ex-Troll on how they managed to produce excellent Qt documentation
To me it wasn't painful at all. Compared to a lot of other crap that makes it onto the front page of HN I personally liked this story.

Also, not everyone who shares their stories and advice must and can be a great writer. The idea behind the story is what counts. Of course, if a story is also entertaining to read that's a bonus.
Have you actually read Kurzweil because it doesn't seem like you have...
Why, then, do we not blame the government instead of Wall Street?
I'm pretty sure they do. Justified text looks more "professional" than ragged right one. The problem with it is, that it can create rivers without proper hyphenation. TeX is pretty good at this stuff and that's one reason why text set with TeX looks so good. I wish browsers would catch up on this.
I must admit I'm a big fan of autogenerated novellas. But I'm going to guess you actually mean publishers not authors, which is at the moment still not true for several reasons.
It really doesn't need to cost that much though. I wouldn't be surprised if every state in the US has a public school that costs less than a quarter of that. (and obviously college is much cheaper in every other country). To clarify, I wasn't saying I thought that was the sole benefit of college - just one that never seems to get mentioned.
The Legal Stuff
The singularity may not be coming, however, there are still huge questions and challenges looming ahead. Individual humans don't seem to be able to resist the thirst for power, and society as a whole seems too passive to stop them... We just watch as it unfolds, hoping we'll get cool gimmicks in the process. That's insane.

"Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery."

-- Jean Paul Sartre

It's all just a bunch of tools! We could use them to be good to each other, or to just keep doing what we did; moving from scarcity of resources and horsepower and intellect, to artificial scarcity based on greed and control. Technology just amplifies the impact of our choices on us, others and our environment; but it doesn't make them for us.
Agreed. I was interested up until this point..."Your PHP scripts will be evaluated by SAPI components: web server module, PHP-fpm or CLI. All needed for PHP deploying is a SAPI environment."

What? Sorry but I know nothing about deployment. Should I? In the past I've only used PHP to solve simple problems.
Video: Six things I've learned as a startup founder
Show HN - Turing Festival
In a couple of weeks time there is the 2nd Turing Festival in Edinburgh on the theme 'Digital Everywhere'. All kinds of cool stuff - people from the Higgs Boson Team at Cern, people from the JPL Interplanetary Exploration Team, the lawyer who won the Twitter Bomb Joke trial in the UK, Steve Wozniak, etc, etc. turingfestival.com

It takes place during the famous Edinburgh Festival which is a month of culture with thousands of performers. We modelled it on the Festival itself - a curated core and then a totally open, do-it-yourself fringe where anyone can organise anything.

What I want to show you is not this year's Turing Festival - but next year's one - the one where Hacker News folk organise crazy sessions on Modern Assembly, NoSQL hacking, home made submarines and near space balloon photography or whatever on the Fringe at Turing.

(Its not too late to come to Turing this year though, and TuringTown will find you a place to stay with local geeks as well).

If you want to do something my email is on my HN account.
They look like calibration targets to me.
Doesn't matter, you'd still have to learn Vim first.

Textmate is about bringing unix and scripting power to people who don't have time to learn an esoteric system
New native-like app framework now in Chrome Dev Channel
While I wonder about the specific numbers (his "150" is probably more like 20 for me) I have to admit it's certainly not much of a controversial statement to say that the person with >200 friends on Facebook isn't really friends with all of them.
Good thing Textmate has never set out to be "The best raw text editor" then.

And really who cares how some Windows program with a fraction of features and capabilities is compared to a Mac app
It is fantastic PR, though. It sounded fantastic to me until I remembered that I have a private policy that is about 7x salary plus a separate policy that repays my mortgage, and the combined cost is low enough that I don't notice when it goes out each month.

If I wasn't paying for my own separate insurance, I probably would've been easier to wow with this.
maybe it has been discussed before (i didn't follow the craigslist discussions) but it's funny that craigslist does not have any robots.txt on it's city subdomains

i.e.:
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/sub/3195940666.html
is hosted on
http://newyork.craigslist.org/

but http://newyork.craigslist.org/robots.txt makes an HTTP 302 redirect to http://www.craigslist.org/robots.txt, but http://www.craigslist.org/robots.txt is only a valid robots.txt for http://www.craigslist.org, and not for http://newyork.craigslist.org/, as the host, protocol and port of the robots.txt file is an essential part of its validity range.

so basically newyork.craigslist.org does not have any robots.txt and can be crawled as you like.

if you want more about it, see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index...

>The directives listed in the robots.txt file apply only to
>the host, protocol and port number where the file is hosted.
I was thinking about this sort of thing a few weeks ago. I think it's more about 'control' rather than 'safety'.

Heres my take:

fiscally conservative politician = tight control on spending

fiscally liberal politician = loose control on spending (just throw money at whatever, who cares)

fiscally conservative programmer = tight control over code (refactoring, design patterns, documentation, tests)

fiscally liberal programmer = loose control over code (who cares if it's spaghetti code, as long as it runs)

socially conservative politician = tight control over people (no abortions/gay marriage/legal weed for anyone)

socially liberal politician = loose control over people (let people do what they want)

socially conservative programmer = tight control over people (heavy process, waterfall)

socially liberal programmer = loose control over people (light process, agile, "just write good software")

I'm a socially liberal, fiscally conservative programmer. At my last job everyone was fiscally liberal and socially conservative. I did not last long at that job.
> Hydrogen (fusion) on the other hand, pretty much defines the useful lifetime of the universe. That's how I define "sustainability".

That's true! That's true and funny! Hydrogen fusion does define the "useful" lifetime of the universe (ie: the interval before the entire universe becomes mainly full of cold heavy metals), but the stars are going to be burning for a few more billion years because fusion is an "unlikely" process. Yes! The solar system is still as we know it, with the planets well separated from the Sun and not yet conglomerated into a big red giant, for the same reason for which we are struggling to get fusion in our labs: because that's difficult! You need enormous temperatures to convince hydrogen atoms to come together and mix their nuclei, and so you get a lot of problems in controlling the overall process.

Sure, we can try with cold fusion, but unfortunately we have not yet got a useful result. But we can insist. Actually, I think we must insist! I can't imagine a better source of energy than cold fusion, if we ever get there. Yes, we must definitely insist!
Am I the only person who thought that this is about "Nuclear waste" issuing "freeze permits"?
absorbent = exorbitant?
From the wikipedia[1]: "Congress established the agency under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which President Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 29, 1970."

Nixon[2] also tried to get Universal Health Care for all low-income and employed Americans, but it was blocked by Senator Edward Kennedy and other Democrats. Maybe politics[3] is just the art of getting the state to delegate property rights, even intellectual property, rather than itself productive pursuit.

I postulate[4] that discussions in political spectrum are no more a valuable expenditure of time and resources than painting styles being be a point of reference for programmers.

In summary this topic is an "Unknown or expired link" to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_Safety_and_Health...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics

[4] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/postulate
For what it's worth, I loved your post too. It reminded me of chats with my advisor. I'd walk in thinking "who the hell am I to push the boundaries of human knowledge?" and walk out excited to get back to work.
Had a blast giving this talk. The format really seemed to work: six topics for ten minutes each (six minutes talking, four minutes taking questions).
Thanks - that's what I get for posting at 4 in the morning.
☑ Things 2
You don't necessarily need to know about the SAPI, but what he says is true. Any environment (Apache, Lighttpd, FPM, CLI, ...) that runs PHP, is built on top of the SAPI provided by the Zend Engine.

That's interesting stuff, but not on the "must know" list.
If this content is mostly for spiders, I don't see why you couldn't cache the resulting HTML for 1 hour or so and only regenerate new pages.
Interesting you say this, as most people will tell you to define it in terms of products people already know and use. Most people would get "a Facebook timeline but private"
MakeLeaps (Sellng SaaS in Japan post) buys Japan-based invoicing service Noroshi
When guy A gives guy B money to lift him out of bankruptcy and guy B spends it on crack and hookers, most of us blame guy B.
Theres a bunch of cases where physical book costs less than the ebook. Most are roughly the same. I assume margins are greater on ebooks as well, no cost to print them, no transportation cost, no shipping cost.
OT Emacs clunkiness/outdated architecture...give me a break, minimal
core with lisp interpreter on top giving programmable and extensible
platform next to none is still what...30 years ahead of anything called
"modern".
Honestly, I can't see it that way. People that I met and I know how they work and think don't fit in this axis at all. The distinction that I do see is between people that trusts experience of what works and what doesn't (and still willing to test new ideas when it makes sense) and people that rigidly adheres to policies or dogmas.

The type of tools they use and like are circumstantial. It's more of a empiricists vs. authority thing.
I think as a Ruby (and occasionally C) programmer I stand firmly in the liberal camp, but is it weird that I sort of like Haskell too? I find the idea of expressing the semantics of my program through types to be useful sometimes.

Then again my actually political views tend to span the liberal/conservative spectrum so I suppose this is not surprising.
Well, at least you're straightforward that this is your storytelling time. I come to HN for the increasingly rare high signal:noise ratio content and discussion. Given that I don't think HN is the proper medium for this kind of expression.

I read more of your blog and see that you think these are 'troll posts'. They're not.
Charging for the app would be the best way, although if this becomes venture funded then then it will be hard to just do that given the pressure to support a high valuation (see the recent google acquisition of sparrow)
what point are you making? good idea by the way
In the examples given, Dart with its optional type system (and with type-checking that only triggers warnings) would actually fall in the liberal camp.

You can bet that the Mars Curiosity rover isn't
using a garbage collected dynamic language

It's using 2.5 million lines of C. C is not a strongly typed language. C can't really be classified as dynamic or static. C is just low-level assembly with some structure attached.

I don't think that Tim Sweeney or John Carmack
are prematurely optimizing ...

These people's jobs are building engines, not games. If you want to build a game, especially if you don't have their resources and knowledge, you're far better off by starting with friendlier tools, such as PyGame.

It's much cheaper to validate your idea that way and in the process you might end up with a hit like Angry Birds, which runs in the browser just fine.
Eclipse Java Decompiler
>"I hate to be that guy bitching without offering any constructive criticism,..."
No you don't. You love being that guy. If you hated being that guy, you could have, you know, written something constructive.

FWIW if this article is "drivel" then HN must have really high standards.
I think the advocates of the singularity see it as coming from an explosion of the possibilities of technology rather than an explosion of science in general. Kurzweil himself mentions how to the average research scientist, science appears slow and linear (with jumps most coming when a scientist gets a different set of tools to work with).

> Let’s have a hypothetical AI that researches artificial intelligence, and that constantly rewrites its own code to incorporate its finding into its own intelligence.

No,

A hypothetical General AI would double the amount of circuits involved in it's processes to double its intelligence and go from Monkey-brain-sized to human brain sized. Repeat as necessary. The intelligence algorithm running on those circuits doesn't have to improve (though we'd hope it would at least a little).

Of course, you would need an initial intelligent parallel algorithm. That might indeed be hard or impossible. But his argument in itself doesn't proving anything about this.

Sure, even with flexible general AI, some problems would remain hard but a lot of things aren't the Knap-sack problem. In fact there's no evidence the massive success of human intelligence has had much to do with tackling NP-complete problems. Instead, flexibility and pattern finding set human apart from both other animals and the most powerful artifact we can so-far create.

Just consider, Moore's Law continued at least for a fair period driven by humans whose innate intelligence didn't increase at all.
How can you possibly write an article telling PHP programmers to develop in Golang instead without writing anything about web programming in Golang ?

Why do people use PHP mostly ? For web development.

Why PHP guys should learn Golang should at least tell PHP guys if it's possible to do web development in Golang, and how, and show them how it's better suited (without telling them only "it's a better language").
Nasa's Morpheus planetary lander crashes and burns on liftoff
I like the 4 day working concept but it must be pretty difficult to stop people from working. Great video!
Thanks. People seem to be used to not working now on Fridays. It does happen occasionally when we have a big deadline, but not consistently.
Let's reformulate the question: Why not keep the same enclosure, the same lens assembly, the same mechanical parts and simply swap the 2MP sensor for a 20MP sensor?

sigh

I expected more from the people of HN than be stuck in some stupid megapixels race like they're comparing cameras at Best Buy

There, I said it

The first Canon Digital EOS Cameras had a 3Mp sensor. I can bet they wipe the floor with most of today's compact cameras

In a camera, the sensor is much less important than optics. In a 20Mb sensor, the noise in a high radiation environment would probably be much worse as well
Broad-brush talk is a step backwards.

Political talk and thinking is poisoned by the ideas of "left" and "right" even though those phrases haven't had a connection to reality since the French First Republic.

It'll probably be fine. Politics is in many respects a zero-sum game, and polarises participants into two camps. Software isn't like that.