skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post. I wouldn't say that programming makes people less fun, but that the act of programming offers some valuable life lessons. The lesson of "you can't bullshit a compiler" transfers over to knowing how to spot bullshit, which _may_ make you less fun to shitty friends who spew bullshit.

It's the same with running. I picked up running last December, and I've definitely learned something. One learns not to focus on the end goal (say, running 10 miles), but instead to focus on each individual step. Obviously, this metaphor transfers to software development and anything else you do in life.
Maybe Microsoft discovered a process of getting out of an event horizon. The work they're doing right now is very interesting.
Bootstrap 2.1 released
Google announces Pwnium 2, $2m in rewards for Chrome hacks
None of the libraries or patterns I mentioned above are designed for the purpose of exploring category theory. Though some people do do that, but they tend to live in their own world.

A lot of Haskellers just happen to exploit bits of CT it because its a great framework for writing and reasoning about code. Some people do use Haskell as a way to explore category theory but for example Tekmo isn't writing pipes as a means to explore the theory of free monads, they've been well studied since the 80s. I believe he just happens to find that they are an excellent way of chaining together bits of control flow.

At that heart of the problem he's tackling is very practical problem that's tied to data flow and resource management. For example, I've written a library against pipes which handles resource management of ZeroMQ sockets for a large distributed system and find that my code under pipes is much more manageable.
By the reports, he made 800x on his investment. He's held on for a while already.
Large discussion about this, approx. 5 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4386766
To clarify, I do use FreeBSD as my everyday (work) OS, and in almost all my servers, and I use a very lightweight window manager (i3).

I like it that way, but it's not for everyone. Because most people are used and expect a heavyweight and shiny GUI, a modern browser, a pretty music player, autodetection of wifi networks, and that sort of things. I don't draw the line, and I don't particularly think FreeBSD should be for everyone, but, well, people have expectations, you can't just ignore that.
I think of this as analogous to the way computers have increased productivity at work. It's not necessarily that you get your work done faster, it's that you can have a better product in the same amount of time. So instead of wondering about the stuff that's easy to look up, wonder about deeper things. I love Tom Waits, but he's off the mark here: like so many other things, a "deficit of wonder" is a social problem, not a technological one.
I honestly can't tell what you're trying to say. (Other than the last bit, and that part is needlessly noxious.)

"Software that can fit in one's head" and "coherent design vision" are closely related things. I'm in favor of both. If you're saying we're past the point where that's feasible in real-world systems, that's just assuming the conclusion – the wrong conclusion, in my view.
Apparently to prevent paste. Their CheckEnter.js file has:

function keyDown(a) {
if (a.keyCode == 86) {
a.preventDefault()
}
}

And that's assigned to onkeydown...

Funny enough, elsewhere in their code, they do explicitly check for Ctrl & V/C.
Can Microsoft Fail?
HTML5 Video: Things Designers Need To Know
He converted a $500,000 investment into more than $1,000,000,000, which is at least 200,000% ROI. Would you recommend against diversification at this point? Do you provide financial advisory services by any chance?
Show HN: Yet another C SPDY implementation
why would you want to stop paste? don't mobile devices have things like keypass? (i don't own a smartphone, but paste all passwords on my computers).
This article precisely explains what John Carmack was like as a kid.
In my experience, it is way more complicated on the server side and client support isn't that great either (no native iPhone/Android support last I checked). pptpd on the other hand is pretty easy to setup on server side and has excellent client support. The only drawback is that it is less secure than OpenVPN.
Make the world better
Add the Tebow pose!!
Yes, diversification is smart. But you're trying to use this general idea to explain a specific decision that is clearly a matter of timing.

You could claim that everytime an insider at any company sells the majority of his stock he is diversifying. But that's not really looking at what the real reason is. There is a reason that "now" is the "time to diversify". And it's not just because diverisification is generally smart investing.

I guess Facebook represents something for a lot of HN commenters. When Facebook starts it's decline it signifies some larger problem.

It was a tremendous success, some people made many millions from Facebook. So what's the problem if the fad dies down and it all goes south eventually?
I believe the article specifically states that he was jet skiing with friends...
Thanks for the recommendation! Anything particular section I ought to pay especially close attention to?

Also, let me stipulate that Java really does make me sad. It's just that in the realm of sad-making, I discovered new depths.
How the death of a loved one ended a Diablo III addiction
What does "Seen" mean on Facebook chat?
Someone had to say it. When an app gets too talkative, I simply ignore every alert, and eventually when it gets too annoying I remove it, and I know I'm not alone.
I wonder if there will be copyright issues to worry about. E.g. Can we expect Marvel to "DMCA" the design of physical goods (or even the goods themselves)?
I wonder if it's a bad idea to disclaim that you store passwords in plain text (when you actually use PBKDF2 or something) to trick users into making more secure passwords.
They waould want NFC control to leapfrog, so I'd bet on a FB phone and apps for others
Same experience using Slicehost as a VPN and searching on Google:

We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
Bootstrap 2.1.0 is out!
Skilled Work, Without the Worker
Their entire site is a really bad example of ASP.NET development. As someone who knows the technology well, it can make great sites. It just rarely does.

I like my T Mobile service but there's something odd with their backend systems and/or customer service. I logged in to disable their "WebGuard" service that seemed to be blocking pages at random. It required address and social security verification, but I couldn't get it to verify my details.

I called, and the customer service agent hopefully told me that my address didn't exist. I live in the middle of New York, and I've never had this issue before. I can't help but wonder what crazy verification system they're using.
Try using special characters - It will just omit some special characters and save the password with that character omitted. And yes, T-mobile sent back my password in clear-text, and that's how i know.
You can also configure any OpenSSH Server/Client (v4.3 or greater) into a fully-fledged VPN (as opposed to port tunnelling). Granted there are more steps involved in connection than say, OpenVPN, however it is still relatively simple and you get a nice little VPN.
> Why can't people just accept that Facebook is a fad?

I actually made the prediction that Facebook would be where MySpace is--forgotten and irrelevant by the mainstream--by 2006. I was wrong.
Solar-Powered Robots to Track Great White Sharks
This operation is awesome and it does a great job of showing how twitter is going to have a hard time having blessed clients. If twitter wants to rate limit API calls for apps in an effort to reduce abuse then abusers are going to impersonate the official twitter client.
It's really about management. Companies evolve as they grow and the magic sauce that took them from Start up to Successful is not the same sauce that takes them from $1 Billion to $10 Billion and then $10 Billion to $100 Billion.

Moreover, the techno-guild at Exxon is going to have a different mandate than Cisco's or Disney's.

Managing growth, competition and markets is the job of management (CEO) and understanding the role that technology plays in their business, and then ensuring that foresight is available (CTO) to them to act on, is what they get paid for.

A Bozo at Amazon might be a god at Delta Airlines.
Great guide.. Spine.js is definitely friendlier than backbone for Ruby devs
I agree, this has happens to me regularly. Someone reaches out on email asking for advice, I take the time to write a significant response, and get none in return. I've also found it discouraging as this kind of response is the most common I get. It's rare for me to see so much as a "thanks for the reply!" and rarer still to see an in kind response. I'm not very motivated to reply when I've been trained that they usually won't return the courtesy.
A friend of mine is really big on the term "freetard" for open source software.
Facebook would be unbelievably lucky to be the next Yahoo! -- sure, they're dead meat now, but that just means its easy to forget what a success Y! used to be.
Great post. Though I'd say that programming DOES make you less fun. Because after having programmed for awhile, you eventually learn that you can't bullshit a compiler. And that immunity to bullshit makes you immune to shitty friends who spew bullshit. So programming makes you less fun to those people. :D

But of course, any hobby changes you on the inside. I picked up running last December, and it's taught me the value of "one step at a time" and "focus on what's in front of you, not the end goal." I think everyone needs a serious hobby that teaches these essential life metaphors.
Personally, that'd steer me away.
It'd be terrible PR though
To be honest, I first started out trying to learn iPhone programming, simply out of interest. Unfortunately I got caught in between the transition between Xcode 3 and Xcode 4, where the interfaces and some of the terminology changed and the books were all based on Xcode 3. It got frustrating and tedious trying to convert concepts from Xcode 3 to 4 and back, so I decided to jump to web programming, since I envisioned the back-end of many iPhone apps would be web-based, with the goal of returning back to iPhone programming. During that time, I made some pretty good progress with the web stuff, and it was pretty enjoyable so I just stuck with it. Pretty soon, I'll get back to learning iPhone programming.

Personally I think C/C++ is still relevant, and it's my language of choice, but I'm not close-minded about it. For example, in developing my OCR functionality, I discovered how wonderful Python was, because it was a sane programming language, and allowed for much quicker development and progress than C++. I'm now a Python convert, although I still have many more miles to travel before I can become a competent Python programmer. In addition, Javascript is a lot more powerful that I imagined, and it looks like a lot of people are turning Javascript into something a lot more powerful, ex. Node.js. If I had to put my money behind the languages that might really blow up in the near future, it's Javascript and Python.

As to the career opportunities of C++, I can't really speak for that because trends change quickly. The key is to be flexible and open-minded, and not get stuck in a particular pigeonhole otherwise you'll find yourself like COBOL programmers in the late 90s. You will definitely learn a lot by going the C++ route, and being "closer to the metal" as some people say, you can and will learn a lot of different concepts that aren't available to many other languages, like memory-management, etc. It might make it easier to take up other languages in the future, as well, so it's not something I would discourage anyone from learning.
So one of the things I've been doing to amuse myself during patent-a-geddon is looking at the filing/issue dates of the patents in question. This is because its my assertion that technology 'got ahead' of the patent examiners around 1997 and then didn't catch up until approximately 2005.

These patents were filed between 1998 and 2002 with issue dates in 99,02, and a couple in 06.

My belief (which clearly isn't shared by a lot of folks) is that during the late 90's a lot of 'obvious' stuff got patented because the examiners didn't have the technical chops to know better. And then a lot of that same stuff got built into systems later because people coding them made the assumption the stuff was obvious and thus not patentable. And we ended up here in infringement city.
Analysing HN traffic from the front page to job offers in my inbox
Single-user OpenVPN has become much simpler to set up than it used to be, because you can just use preshared keys and not worry about creating a certificate authority.
Thanks for your comment. It's an interesting question and quite a bit of of certainty. Here's a bit of an overview: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-05/31/3d-printing-c...
Would be nice if the dates in the selection range were highlighted, and unselectable dates (eg. later than the end date in left calendar, earlier than start date in right calendar.) were grayed out.
> OP is a wanker. Wah-wah, Millennials are entitled and don't want to do 70 hours per week of our grunt work, and they leave before they burn out and we can fire them.

Insults and straw men don't belong here.
The type of users that use insecure passwords probably don't care about or understand the implications of plain text passwords.
The printed output strings look like HTTPS requests. Wouldn't it have just been simpler to use Charles to run an SSL MitM attack? I highly doubt these twitter clients check what certificate they're using beyond whether it's trusted.
Facebook a fad? Think of it this way...

The social web is just as important as search on the web. The web will always have search engines, and it will always have social networks. Google took over where Excite and Altavista left off. Facebook took over where MySpace and Friendster left off.

Google controls the majority of the social search market.
Facebook controls the majority of the social network market.

So you might be saying, that's nice, but Facebook can't monetize it's users!

Have you ever looked at Google search results lately and noticed that nearly 1/2 the screen above the fold could be ad space? Don't believe me? Search for "iphone".

Yet we all think nothing of it. We've accepted it as users of Google.

Imagine if Facebook found a way to get it's users to ACCEPT ads. Start small, like Google and gradually increase it over time to what it is now.

That doesn't sound far fetched does it?
Sign us up - we'd actually love to send orders your way, if you can set this up. Quality control is just super important for this to work, but we'd be happy to be a pilot customer.

We're small right now (2 people) with ambitions that do surpass our size.
Segmenting the SaaS Market for Sales Strategy
I know .edu's get a bump

No they don't.

While some insist that simply having a .edu domain, regardless of the site’s quality, content, and incoming links, will give you more weight with the major search engines, it’s just not true. Who says so? Matt Cutt, a top engineer at Google, in this video.[1][2]

and

Sadly this whole engagement is based on a faulty assumption: It is not the Edu-toplevel domain which gives universities such a high relevance in Google for their references but the backlink-structure of the domains themselves. Universities have the advantage that on one hand, in most cases they have had online representations for a long time (stanford.edu for example was registered 1985) and on the other hand they have lots of content which was and is linked voluntarily. This is a long time to (unconsciously) build a “great” backlink-structure in Google's point of view.[3]

Hopefully that addresses your second point, too:

I wouldn't be surprised if .com's did as well but I've never had that confirmed

You should be astonished if they did.

Having said that, some early naive autocomplete implementations in browser address bars bias .com over other extensions. I'm not sure anyone has ever measured the impact of this.

[1] http://www.searchenginejournal.com/truth-about-edu-domains-r...

[2] The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EE163OGjfo&feature=gv

[3] http://www.sistrix.com/blog/751-the-.edu-domain-myth.html
2 days early! So excited. Too excited perhaps.
For the truly lazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK
There's moving deck chairs, and there's tweaking feedback loops.

50+ years' experience with same-people-different-system states (East & West Germany, North & South Korea, Hong Kong/Taiwan vs. PRC, and others, not all democratic v. Communist states) show that small changes in annual growth rate can compound drastically over time.

While I'm not suggesting that all the ills of the world can be resolved just by adjusting various marginal tax rates, I am strongly suggesting that shifting incentives for major economic activity from rent-seeking value-extraction to socially-benefiting wealth-creation would be a big plus. Tim O'Reilly's been making some vary interesting comments in this regard over on Google+.
http://www.rssident.com/mash/?t=bay
My trick is usually just to setup a socks5 tunnel to a remote machine running OpenSSH. The nice thing about this is that you don't have to install anything on your system, and most people have access to a remote Linux/BSD-based server.

Nifty one-liner to set it properly up: "ssh user@host -D 8080". Then you just point your system wide proxy to localhost:8080 and magically see all your data be tunneled.
Only as to the year. Give it time. They have a lot of money to spend so the decline will be slow and they will not go down without making lots of noise and buying out lots of potential successors. But the decline is beginning. Sooner or later Facebook believers have to accept this.

I'm excited about the decline because it means the rise of something better. Continual improvement. When one door closes, another opens. But I recognise that many others do not share my optimism. Facebook represents something to them, I guess. I can't quite understand it.

Facebook is one step along the path. It was a fad that drew a remarkable amount of attention and participation. The internet just keeps growing. We are in its infancy.
I get this same message about once a week since I frequently use my Linode VPS as a proxy for my web traffic, but it's never lasted for more than a half hour or so. I've always wondered why their heuristics only seem to notice me so infrequently. Do you get it consistently?
A more interesting spin is TCP-over-DNS. Some networks will block TCP but not DNS, so you send all your traffic over DNS.

It's not very efficient, though.

If you have a server somewhere, there's no real limit to the creative ways you can get around network restrictions.
It's Official: Consciousness Is Not Unique to Humans
if you have a say on hiring and don't have a say on the employees working environment

Anyone in that position should probably be the one looking for a new job.
What did you do to get started (with Django)? I understand nothing beats hard-earned experience, but were there any tutorials or books that stood out in particular?

I'm saying this as a complete newbie to web development.
Three days after suing Apple, Google says patent wars hurt consumers
marquis, please drop us a note at contact@dreamforge.me and we'll definitely send you an email when we have the female superhero added
When SSHing from a Linode server, I generally get a captcha on Google and then I assume they whitelist my IP for a bit, because I don't see it again.
As a manager I would consider two years to be the minimum commitment for full time employment.

So, wait... you're saying you want employees to commit to you for 2 years, no matter how bad the job turns out to be? Ok, so are you going to commit to the employee for a minimum of 2 years, no matter how bad the employee turns out to be?

Or are you just trying to have your cake and eat it to? Employees don't exist to make your life easier, they're people, with their own dreams, hopes, goals and ambitions... why should they take one on the chin for you, if it might interfere with their pursuit of what matters to them?
Irony: complaining about bozos and then writing this sentence:

"Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something (the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so elegant that you just smile when you use them."
It is a Python script I execute from a PHP file, so it doesn't have any knowledge except for the files that I am trying to scan.

I google just about any HTML issue I have, so I don't spend too much time trying to learn the intricacies of it. If anything, trying to understand why CSS was behaving as it was, was what got me closest to smashing my keyboard more than a handful of times. Stupid Wordpress.

But I don't think it's necessarily a waste of time for absolute beginners to learn and memorize HTML as their first exposure to "programming". Having a fundamental understanding of how making changes to a script or file affects the output to a web browser is something that I imagine most non-programmers aren't familiar with, so having a firm grasp of this concept will probably help them digest more advanced concepts later on. Being able to whip up a web page is probably one of the first things I would teach beginners if I ever taught a course on programming.
You can tunnel out that way just fine, but even with setting up dynamic SOCKS forwarding (ssh -D [bind_address:]port) it's less effective and more work. You're dependent on being able to set proxies per-application, the applications supporting it through some central mechanism (generally flaky), or using proxychains to force an application to use the SOCKS forward (insanely flaky IME).

What sshuttle buys you is transparent interception and forwarding of tcp with firewall rules (no proxies), more reliable DNS tunnelling, packet reassembly that avoids the worst tcp-over-tcp performance nightmares, and control of any or all networks that should be tunneled to. There are a couple of nice bonuses like better traffic reporting, toggle for latency vs. throughput, and the ability to offer tunneling to other local machines, but really it's a decent alternative to a vpn for anything that only uses UDP for DNS.

TL;DR Less tinkering needed, more reliable, more pleasant to use, supports more applications.
Yes, I have never been able to access Google from my Slicehost VPN IIRC. I also used a Linode VPN for a while and got the message infrequently with the possibility to enter a CAPTCHA to complete my request.
Nothing beats the Breaking Bad Cooking Meth Soundtrack.

http://www.uproxx.com/music/2012/08/breaking-bad-cooking-met...
He dumped his shares at half the IPO price. Say what you will about diversification, it doesn't represent much faith in the future growth of the company. You don't "diversify away" from a good investment.

So, if you believe that Thiel is a savvy investor, then it's hard to be bullish in Facebook.
They bought Kinect, other than that I can't see any real innovation in the last 5 years. Consider there is plenty of talk about surface, but they where talking about it before the iPad came out and it's still little more than a tech demo. Bing is not bad, but it's interface is on par with Duck Duck Go and hardly the 'revolution' in search they were hoping for.

That said, they do seem to keep refining things and that's a path to great products. But, innovation is more than just doing a mash-up that meets everyone's expectations without any 'wow' factor.
A VC’s Perspective on Early Stage Tech Marketing and Sales
Same experience with Linode but unfortunately, I don't even get a CAPTCHA when using my Slicehost VPN.