skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, but that was due to the '96 telecom act. They wanted it to be able to get into long distance, but that backfired. As soon as others started making meaningful inroads in deploying DSL, they were crushed. Essentially the cat was let out of the bag, but it did cost tax payers billions in subsidies for fiber to the home that never happened and the 'duopoly' of cable and DSL.
Interesting comments on the Extend page [1] on why LESS vs SASS:

Why LESS?

One of Bootstrap's creators wrote a quick blog post [2] about this, summarized here:

- Bootstrap compiles faster ~6x faster with Less compared to Sass

- Less is written in JavaScript, making it easier to us to dive in and patch compared to Ruby with Sass.

- Less is more; we want to feel like we're writing CSS and making Bootstrap approachable to all.

[1]:
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/extend.html

[2]: http://www.wordsbyf.at/2012/03/08/why-less/
I agree. But I hate the crappy abstraction that is Web Forms. It throws so much garbage on top of the HTTP request-response cycle, and so many developers are content to remain ignorant of what's going on underneath or how the Web actually works.
Show HN: Please comment on my weekend project
When I decided to try creating a Ruby e-mail newsletter two years ago, I had people saying e-mail was old technology, they wanted RSS, it wouldn't work, etc. And I've heard that many times over the years. Now at 74k subscribers (across four newsletters) and it has become my main business by accident. My takeaway is that it's better to pay attention to what people do, rather than what they say.
Any comments you had would be appreciated :) I'm a chemical engineer by trade, and this is my first foray into web development.
I keep hearing about a shortage of programmers. Perhaps if we didn't write pointless code, there would be enough.
> an inability to effective monetize their users

this is the problem - facebook's value proposition for a user is not Facebook itself, but the ability to interact with another person easily (games, photoshares, pokes etc). However, this isn't actually worth very much money, and to try to extract that from the user is fruitless.

The only real way to monetize is really to sell behavioural data of its users to advertisers. There is real value in that, even if the users don't like it. But its a double edged sword, and this sword is what is going to kill facebook!
You call me a kid because you claim using a single line syntactic feature of a language isn't maintainable. It's like claiming for loops are unmaintainable and that we should wrap them inside methods.

It's not people hating Java: it's you afraid of looking at other tools.
Here's my crazy crackpot theory for solving the password problem.

Users should have a handful of passwords, in the old security-level style; everyday sites use a short simple password, email a level up, banking a level up again.

But the passwords should not be entered directly into sites. Instead, they should be hashed by a browser feature / plugin, roughly equivalent to bcrypt(password + user-specific-salt + site DNS name). The output of this process is what gets provided to sites. Not all sites will accept the full entropy of bcrypt or similar, so there needs to be a central registry tracking acceptable mappings from the output of bcrypt to the input of a site's password. There's also an issue around sites that share accounts across different top-level DNS names - Amazon in particular - that can also be handled by the same central registry technique.

This way, there is no list of passwords to worry about backing up, losing or handing over to third parties - everyone should be able to remember two or three passwords. There is no Javascript vulnerability like you see with bookmarklets for things like SuperGenPass. Every website sees a unique and specific password, even if the same underlying password is used by different people.

The only thing you need to worry about is your browser getting completely owned, so that the memory space of its extension mechanism is accessed by remote websites. But if the attacker has that level of control, it's not unreasonable to think he has control over a third party password manager too.

What it doesn't do well is revocation and renewal of a password. It also has a single point of failure - if someone somehow gets access to your underlying password, and knows the mechanism and salt, they can open a whole lot of boxes. This, of course, is why I'm a crackpot: I can live with that.
Knowing when to switch modes is very helpful.

Quick one-offs by text are great. Voice is much easier in certain situations (when typing is difficult, when driving). And at times, voice allows for a much more rapid exchange than text. A quick 1-5 minute phone call can be far less interruptive than a 15 minute sequence of texts or IMs.

Sometimes, as well, it's simply nice, or the right thing, to talk to someone.

I feel no obligation to respond to and/or pick up any given communication from a stranger. Family, friends, and co-workers are generally given a much higher priority (though not absolute).
if you don't have something like mobile keepass(or you don't have a current password file, i don't think keepass for android can add passwords)
or the app prevents you from pasting the password, entering a long complicated password can be difficult. Pasting helps improve the likelyhood of long complicated passwords.
I like the new navigation and layout better because I can find everything in one large column. Before I had to scan both up/down and right/left because of the multi-column layout.
Any comments you had would be appreciated!
Google+ Hangouts and Amateur Astronomy
Yeah! Was it done in Emacs artist-mode by any chance?
Google Native Client - The Pepper Proxy (Part 3)
We are the original manufacturer of a unique product. Based on the answers here, I think we'll go ahead with FbA.

Thanks guys!
Samsung Galaxy S3 64GB To Be Released
Since the allocation space is different, it's generally a rebuild. The only exception would be a DB storing integers as a variable length int - unusual.
Assuming you're on Linux, you can just pipe the input into "xargs xdotool type". Thanks to the keyboard abstraction in X, no program will ever be able to tell that you didn't just type that on a keyboard.
Second the Tebow pose. +1
The Automagic Music Maker: my Google summer of code project 2012
Site (is/was) dead, google cache version: http://tinyurl.com/cqojywn
I had to use inspector to make the page readable, but it's a PITA. GP is a jerk.
The DEA is way worse than the TSA. The TSA only harasses you, whereas the DEA kills, imprisons, seizes, and tramples the constitution any chance they can. The TSA can be avoided, but the DEA can raid the wrong house, and possibly kill you. DEA wrong house raid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHP4jBXnSfA
Las 10 Redes Sociales más populares del 2012
A little over 3.5 billion. I think he was saying that the revenue considering the company size and user base (almost 1 billion) is not very much.
And since my blog has never had more than 5 people on it at a time... it crashed.
It would be a huge help if there was a standardized web API for changing passwords on a site. I don't know how many sites you need to change passwords for; I've got several hundred, all unique, and I certainly don't change them quarterly.

(It would also help attackers, of course - they could instantly lock owners out of whole heaps of accounts once they got a password that got reused. On balance, though, I think the benefits would be positive, since a motivated hacker can already lock people out of high-value accounts, and the drudgery factor of changing passwords regularly is very high.)
Are there regulations pertaining to how the data must be stored? i.e. do these 40TB have to be fully encrypted and quadruple redundant? i mean it would still be a laughably small amount (since a usb flash drive now can have 1TB ) and disc costs are pennies per GB.

I feel like there has to be another reason.
This might be a good place to complain about -ed out passwords on mobile phones. It makes it next to impossible to enter a password(yes the last letter not -ed out for a few seconds only helps a tiny bit). If I'm not copy-pasting from keepass I'm entering the password in the login field then cut/paste it.
The scapegoat theory of founder-investor relationship
"he recovered a 13-character password that he had spent several months trying to crack." -> "The technique is simple enough to do, although it increases the number of required guesses dramatically—from about 26 million, assuming the dictionary Redman uses most often, to about 676 million." -> "8.2 billion Average passwords combinations per second able to be tried by a PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU."

Do the math. 676 million should have taken less than a tenth of a second. Unless some rather major details are missing...
It's tough to say. It partially depends on how you define the ability to play music. I definitely think that the average person can play notes on a piano given enough time for another average person to enjoy.

On a person-to-person basis, we don't know until we try. Kind of like knowing the half-life of some material: we know the decay rate of a large mass, but we can only guess at a per-atom level, and we only truly know when it finally decays. I don't hope to belittle your question, but I don't find it particularly important what the average person can do. I find it much more important to figure out what I can do.
Great job!
Anyways, the site isn't completely dead,it just takes a few tries to get it to load.
Great comment. This is an insightful summary & juxtaposition.

Would also add: mental frame.

Some people may decline to play checkers (too busy) even though pieces on their chess board are not in motion (not apparently busy).

This is distinct to social signalling (NYT) and its not procrastination. Its meta productive (rational) if playing checkeers will decrease my focus and odds of winning at chess.
The more I read about this, the more I think that 2-factor authentication is the future, whether it's using robocalls / texted codes sent to mobile phones, or just a security token. It's easier to just add one of the 3 types of authentication* to the mix rather than wrapping yet another layer of complexity around a single one of them.

* (what you have, what you are, what you know)
At least for me the vague threads of legal action during the aim time where not very vague, but trademark infringement for naming my application Kaim. Unlike the Gaim guys I simply switched my application name Kinkatta (Kinkatta is not Kaim anymore thanks to AOL).
I don't mean to be a mood killer but that has to be taken with a grain of salt. Ruby/Python/Perl are awesome language for beginner because it abstract so much that they think they know how to code after a day, and when they have to learn a new language like C they are completely lost and produce spaghetti code. That might be ok for web development where you can hack here and there (with JS/CSS/HTML) but I really challenge someone that follows that guide to be a embedded device developer or a software engineer using C or even C# or Java.

Anyway good read but again it should be really emphasize that this is an ok road for a web developer.
> The social web is just as important as search on the web.

Teachers are just as important as lawyers. But search captures people looking to solve problems (i.e. potential customers) while social captures people looking to waste time.
VPass: one html page to manage your passwords
Might want to consider octopress since you're a fan of ruby. :)
Is there a reason you believe drawing is a learnable skill? Betty Edwards has shown that it is learnable by actually constructing a curriculum that lifts horribly bad drawers into competent ones.

In an almost identical but betty-edwards free universe, do you have any reason to believe the same?

Do you have reason to believe the opposite about music?
It's inconceivable that projects are expected to host old docs forever. Jesus, it's in the zip that you get if you download the Github snapshot anyway. It's literally 20 seconds of your time to have your own local copy.
I had a different trajectory, but a similar end point (biology -> freelancing -> full-time web dev).

The biggest similarity I noticed between myself and the OP is that you have to put yourself in the way of opportunity. For me it was building side projects and hosting Startup Frontier. For the OP it was ruby meetups and send out an email to the list.

It takes a lot of guts to cold-email people like that, I have a lot of respect for the OP. Good work!
This would be nice. Even better would be to do away with passwords entirely in favor of email + physical token. There's no getting away from the fact that crackers will always get access to a certain number of passwords; properly incentivizing people to pick excellent passwords seems like a fool's errand. Cue xkcd here. I hold out some hope that Apple (my computing vendor of choice) will roll 1Password-like functionality into the OS (both of them). Only a default-secure system will get the general public into a more secure state -- how long has the computer industry tried to strong-arm people into strong passwords, only to be defeated by 12password12 &c.? It's not that users are stupid, it's that the technology to secure computers is an utter failure.
OAuth on the client side is not about restricting access to people hacking up their own clients, its about restricting access to the network for things that don't fit the api owners wishes, in this case involving revenue. Just like content owners dont tend to worry too much when a hard to use and essentially impossible to scale bypass tool is released, but it behind a nice gui and toss it in an appstore and you've brought all sorts of hell upon yourself.

Thinking of oauth on the client as any kind of security measure on the client side is absurd anyways, at best it keeps honest people honest and maybe cuts down on signal/noise for the lowest of the low budget spammers.
My first thought reading through was "heh, but now that I'm in NYC... I wonder what my chances are..." and then bam... there ya go! I'm glad to see stuff like this, and totally agree with the points– especially the whole git-like-a-boss bit.
This won't work with a variety of even quasi intelligent filters. In fact, it's shameful that this works anywhere near as much as it does.

This is way overkill anyway.

Change the SSHD port (since the filters are naive enough to just whitelist ports apparently), then run `ssh -D 8080 user@ec2-instance:80` and voila, you have a SOCKS proxy that will proxy any traffic, including DNS requests. (and good OSes will easily allow you to utilize that proxy system wide)
Agreed, I'm also not sure why he didn't just use the SOCKS proxy in ssh as opposed to sshuttle. ssh -D8080 and then point your network config to localhost 8080 as the local proxy and everything is encrypted.
Unfortunately, xdotool type is schizophrenic with multiple keyboard layouts

http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=13
"In February 2012 I had never written a line of code. But, as of July 11, 2012 I am employed as a full-time Ruby Developer. You can do it too."

Best. Quote. Ever.

I am re-motivated to continue learning programming.

Nice work sir. Congrats.
Totally want to learn C, but I wouldn't even have thought to try if I hadn't tried ruby first. I got my first look at C digging through the Ruby source code, trying to figure out how it implemented Array.sort.

Ruby opened me up to the world of programming and I look forward to exploring the rest!
How does Twitter make money?
The problem with self-learning is one of discipline and motivation. I started a learn-to-code startup and iterated 7 times (now profitable). It's nearly impossible to keep someone engaged without having a human involved. When I think back to how I learned to program, it wasn't alone. I surrounded myself with CS students. And I had a lot of intrinsic motivation before I started.

Join a program like Dev Bootcamp. You'll save an enormous amount of time by working alongside other people with similar goals, and the social pressure will keep you on your toes.
> the DEA can raid the wrong house, and possibly kill you.

And subsequently plant evidence to justify their mistake, which was based on hear-say evidence to begin with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Johnston

...and if you liked that story, there are 31 more here: http://www.mpp.org/our-work/victims/victim-stories.html

:-/
Microsoft opens door for Windows 8 upgrade program. Costs ₹699 in India.
Finding Old Apps for Pen Testers in Training
This type of encouragement results in bright kids becoming good at doing things because they please parents / teachers / professors / bosses.

Whereas our best and brightest should be encouraged to work out things for themselves, push boundaries, and in general, innovate.

Kudos for finding someone that could understand and appreciate what you were capable of, though. Not all kids have that; as a kid it can be very discouraging when you don't have anyone who understands your work to talk to.
There is no more egregious web UI failure than the hated double-hover. It's a disaster of the first water.
I'd really wish some sites would not force me to change the password every other month or every time I clear my cookies or use a different IP: every time, I have to use a simpler password because I just can't come up with a better one without having to write it down somewhere...

3-5 tries with a half hour lockout with an email alert seems like a good solution to me...
Where does the magical $10 number come from in this decision of yours?
Funny seeing Aubrey & Gavin mentioned on an HN post. Both are great guys and also attend the iOS meetups here in Tampa. You're welcome to join too. We're meeting Aug 30th next: http://www.meetup.com/Suncoast-iOS/events/77862782/

Gavin actually talked about you in one of the past meetups, saying how he knows one smart-cookie from his Ruby group who taught himself coding over a few months and got a job through sheer persistence. He mentioned being impressed by the progress in your code at day 1 vs day 30 vs day 90. Great to see you're sharing your lessons here.
If you're looking at how ruby implemented Array.sort you are definitely on the right track !
I'm not sure that's how all people who started with Ruby/Python are evolving but that's good. However I'm not too comfortable trying to lure people to believe that you can write a web client in 2 lines :/

PS: Got downvoted for making a usefull comment ? Seriously guys you can't give a different opinion than the crowd...
Chinese Mandarin Learner: The Winds of Change....?
Driverless Cars (6/6) - Consequences of Intelligent Transport; The Good & Bad
While I absolutely applaud the effort and tenacity of this individual, at the same time, I feel a substantial amount of trepidation regarding the current state of the tech / start-up industry.

Virtually every hot new startup I see on blogs, it just takes a few minutes of basic penetration testing to find gaping security holes. Everything from simple XSS or CSRF to blatant leaking of sensitive user data. Obviously he was hired at a "junior" level but I've interviewed plenty of "senior" candidates who, 5 years ago, would have been "junior" with their skillset and this guy would probably be a coffee-fetching intern. We keep lowering the bar (due to the crazy imbalance of talent vs. jobs right now) in hiring practices and the long-term impact of this practice has me worried.

On the flip-side, seeing all of these amazing ideas being brought to life and fostering such a strong sense of innovation is amazing to see.
Just a heads up, that fixed position element makes for a verrry annoying mobile experience, especially when someone taps to zoom in. This is probably the most common source of my frustration with the mobile web--those annoying social share sidebars that are position-fixed are the primary perpetrators.

I noticed you're using onswipe though which helps, but if someone is using some third party Hacker News reader, onswipe won't load.

Having derailed this thread enough, I love everything about this. Ill never get enough of hearing people's success stories.
Not really a case study but my sister went from never having coded, middle-school math teacher to junior consultant at ThoughtWorks in 5 months via DevBootCamp. TW may be a bit unusual though in that they are willing to train you for a year before actually making money on you.
I think there's an interesting distinction between real-time from the point of view of the user and the technology/systems providing data to the user. I agree that in the future, communication services will be less real-time, allowing users to focus their attention on the task at hand rather than the distraction that is the latest email/text message/tweet.

However, I believe the systems that do handle this communications data will need to be increasingly real-time. There will be so much data that unless it is indexed and collated in real-time, it will be impossible to perform queries to sort through mountains of un-indexed data. I think computers will become more like intelligent agents, bringing things that require immediate action to our attention and filing/organizing everything else for our later consumption.

There are already services, such as News.me and Prismatic, providing these services for Twitter. In the future, I expect the idea behind these services to be closer to the norm rather than the exception they are today.
Melbourne researchers rewrite Big Bang theory
well, jellybean has app encryption http://developer.android.com/about/versions/jelly-bean.html#...
I believe productivity comes with experience and motivation.

I don't know who the so called average engineer is, but I would imagine with enough experience and drive he / she could outperform his / her previous self by a significant factor (10x perhaps?).

I assume the same rule applies to the crazy talented freaks (only with a big head start), but I can't be certain.
Except that port 80 is often intercepted by transparent proxies and the non-HTTP traffic will get dropped. Using port 443 is more reliable as except in the most restricted environment presumptive HTTPS is passed straight through.
Just is a four letter word. Discourse is almost always improved when you remove that word from a sentence.
This. I'm surprised more sites don't utilize a lockout. Even with a 10 or 50 attempt lockout (for a website not PIN) is still better than giving an attacker unlimited attempts.
Big Porn v. Big Web Ruling Could Spell Trouble for ICANN
When I was hired it was with the very clear understanding that I was to be taught a lot and I was being hired for my desire to learn. Sometimes if you can't find a qualified candidate you have to train them.
Until we lose communication with the rover because a bit of conductive dirt shorted the antenna.
Really? I'm seriously confused.
Yay, that's exactly what our industry needs; more cargo cult programmers writing terrible software! Let's just be glad that this RoR guy isn't building anything safety critical.
Really awesome to see a self-taught success story like this. Love the dedication Jeff!

A side point of advice for anyone wanting to learn programming and still in college: DEFINITELY take an introductory programming class. There's endless amounts you can learn online, but learning the fundamentals through languages like C and Scheme gives you great perspective when you do pick up web code.
since a usb flash drive now can have 1TB

Link?
I'd also be interested if you have the archives available. My email is also in my profile.
Why don't you "just" use JavaScript?
It was not answered, I would like if people discussed this here, for example, if patents begins to be awarded massively on design would we have design patents trolls after some time? For example people registering elements of common use as their patents and suing people because of that.