skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The history of CS / software engineering, how to learn it?
So, I have read a number of threads lately where people bemoan the general lack of historical knowledge of CS and software engineering (yes, I know this are somewhat non-overlapping magisteria). As someone that is woefully ignorant of said past how should I remedy this deficiency? Specifically what books/papers are seminal works or at least broad overviews of the space? I am not necessarily asking for the N research papers that any "real" hacker should read, but rather for the kind of historical perspective that is apparently so lacking with kids now days.
Controlling Positive Feedback Loops in Online Communities
Well, there's the Keychain. But its password generation is hidden deep in the program, not right there when you're asked to create one. And it doesn't synch to anything, not even iOS devices, so it's pretty much useless for generating passwords that are, say, 2k of line noise.

It would be totally awesome if Apple acquihired 1PW or LastPass or somesuch, and set things up so that it's always right three, helpfully offering a new super-entropic password whenever you're joining a new site.
Which headers do you believe are sent in the clear over https?
More detailed information about why the IETF continues to use ASCII (and not UTF-8) from Martin Rex:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg60573.h...
Apple's record-breaking valuation - From pipsqueak to powerhouse
Great. Now if someone would simply create a badass client for this for Mac (like Backblaze or Mozy) … we'd be in business. :)
Javascript DB wrapper for Indexeddb, WebSql supporting query and transaction
Nice - I was watching this yesterday as it happens. Rob does a nice job with this one I though. Seems like he is aiming at the .NET community though, and with the hoo-ha about win 8 and metro style apps, can't say I blame him - there will, I think, be a massive market for bringing .net developers kicking and screaming into the HTML5/Javascript future. I work with quite a few of them and it's almost as if jQuery, node, backbone etc has passed them by.
Pic3D-II Camera : La 3D sans lunettes sur iPhone devient possible
Duo Security, from some of the Open{BSD,SSH} guys, offers a nice two-factor auth layer that's pluggable into any web or online service; push notifications, SMS, or voice. Similar to Google Authenticator except that Duo isn't limited to Google supported services (although they did take an investment from Google Ventures).
is this really something thats regarded a lifehack? my grandmother brews coffee this way since ... i dont know .. since she brews coffee.

there are even machines that mimic this: vhttp://www.amazon.de/Philips-60-Gourmet-schwarz-silber/dp/B0...
Or just;

"Omit words."
This is fantastic. I've long searched for a solution like that. This is really suitable for a remote backup that only needs to be accessed if something really bad happens (i.e. a fire breaking out, etc). I'm a lone entrepreneur, so I do have backup hard disks here, but being able to additionally save this data in the cloud is great.

I'm often creating pretty big media assets, so Dropbox doesn't necessarily offer enough space or is - for me - too expensive in the 500gb version (i.e. $50 a month).

Glacier would be $10 a month for 1 terabyte. Fantastic.
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I've seen this a few times. It's usually not quite as insane as it looks. The underlying reasons that I've seen are:

* The web site is tied to an old fashioned batch system/mainframe that doesn't run in the same mode 24/7. Yes, the implementors could write a separate queue that managed this - but that would be often be a non-trivial amount of work.

* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, which has escapes that occasionally push the user out to talk to a human being. The human's aren't available 24/7.

* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, and there are legal or social requirements that the applications be "fair" - i.e. that the people going through the online and offline process should have the same opportunities. Having the online system run 24/7 puts people with online access at a significant advantage.
I had a quick skim through the marketing stuff and the FAQs and didn't see anywhere that actually details what the backend of this is. I'd be curious if they're actually using tape, older machines, Backblaze pods, etc. I guess if it's the latter, the time to recover could be an artificial barrier to prevent people from getting cute.
In the world of mobile displays and retina displays, people need to start using percentages more and fixed widths less.
ESR seemed to target linux userland and GNU-toolchain/utilities in his description of Linux as a Bazaar, although not to the exclusion of the kernel.

I think it is plausible to describe the kernel as much more Cathedral-like, at least in parts where Linus is very strict about how components should be integrated. I can see where parent could have got this impression.

At the same time, there are parts of kernel that are bazaars. Virtualization/Hypervisor support is the area I'm most familiar with; the various hypervisor vendors basically crammed their paravirt calls and passthrough drivers in, without unifying the interface at all. Yes, Linus and others were very aggressive with maintaining the code quality, but less with the architecture.
There are other areas of kernel (particular drivers), where we've seen similar situations.
Agreed - I'm really happy about this. I have a home NAS solution that is a few TB and it's too expensive to store on S3. This is perfect to prevent the "house burned down" scenario on very large storage devices!
Literary Memory
Arq's support is enough. http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
AWS Blog: Amazon Glacier: Archival Storage for One Penny Per GB Per Month
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How do you make sure no one else is using your home router proxy?
Get socked, you heel. This is a toe away zone.
starred out. markup ate starts.
What problems did you have with the Ruby environment? I went through this several months ago, and maybe can help you get set up, if you're still interested in Ruby.
A) he has sold a good portion of it. B) Berkshire Hathaway is a holding company. It is diversified already. So there is much less of a need to sell it.
Werner Vogels: Managing Cold Storage with Amazon Glacier
Nike Dunk Kids Shoes For Sale Shop
How iPhone Twitter App Has Almost Wasted My Whole Monthly Data Plan
Do not leave your iPhone switched on with Twitter Application trying to open a link in its internal browser.
Created this service because I was fed up using a dozen or so specialized sites to keep track of various aspects of my life (e.g. outdoor trips to help plan future trips, list of movies I've watched, how long ago I got my last haircut etc). I wanted something more generic with better control over my data, but without resorting to Excel. Now I'm hoping to expand this service to make it useful to more people, so any feedback is appreciated!
Hm, that link was 404 as well until just a moment ago. Must have taken time to propagate to the edge servers or whatever is going on there.
I nominate the title for the loaded question of the month club. When will the author stop beating his wife?
I wish I could take back my downvote. T_T
Backup Github Issues
You can use the HideMyAss VPN service. I used it to stream the Olympics http://engineerwithoutacause.com/how-to-stream-2012-olympics...
It already supports it?
Chronozoom: Visualize all history
Since this is built on top of S3, I'd love to be able to store EBS Snapshots in this.
Agree. I've been there. Those need to be 10 hours you planned on being only 6.
190chan: a ~190 line *chan implementation with html/js insertion
Dropbox confirms that they’re working on a two-factor authentication
I think Amazon have their own "backblaze pods"...
They're probably better deals than if the companies went under. I think his point is that the possibility of an acquihire removes a good deal of risk.
Tales of a First Time Driver Developer
The Art & Technology Behind Google Doodles
I posted this because I figured HN people would be interested in discussing the section on 'Abuse'.
More and more I feel like passwords are a fundamentally broken system. We need a better system of locks and keys.

What is is, I don't know. I just know that it's not "passwords".

Especially when there are still sites that limit you to like 8 characters out of a highly restricted set. Usually of course these are banks.
Awesome!!! Congratz and good luck!
HTML/JS insertion wasn't anything I ever intended for, but it turned out to be a really neat feature/bug.

You can do almost anything by inserting a little JS, like inserting an image, changing thread background or styling text (something that would normally be done in bbcode/etc).
And among other things, if you don't like a thread, you can "close" it with <!-- or redirect it elsewhere.

I think this would be a really interesting feature on a "real" message board (albeit with some constraints)
Ask HN: What is wrong with billmonk?
I have been a long time billmonk users. There were some availability problems last year but they were resolved. Now again for last couple of weeks it's highly unstable.

I believe obopay is not interested in maintaining it. Any suggestion for alternatives?
Because not everyone knows everything, and the entire point of being HACKERS (I assume the uppercase is useful) is to promote learning and sharing knowledge.

So whilst this is probably not front news worthy of LEET HACKERS it's probably made someone go 'hey thats cool' and that's all it needed to do.
Atomic Scala
eBay Bans Sales of Spells, Curses, Advice and Other ‘Intangibles’
Let me get this out right now: Valuations mean jack shit (companies/houses/startups/humans - whatever). Especially "market caps".

Understand this:

21.91 million shares of Apple were traded yesterday. That is $14,460,600,000 moving around. [1]

Now you must adjust down for HFT traders, market makers, option hedgers, futures guys and anyone else who trades massive amounts of stock each and every day. My rule of thumb is ~10% actually moves hands (rather than just being moved around).

So now we are at $1,460,600,000. Only $1.5 billion dollars actually moved around yesterday. If you had $1.5 billion dollars yesterday you could've controlled the "market cap/valuation" of 1 billion shares and half a trillion in value.

You can control the market cap of anything utilising the fact that valuation uses multiplicative leverage on stuff that doesn't exist yet. [2][3] Indeed - all those teengers you see in college at age 11? Way overvalued - come and check back in 10 years. Fallacy of exponential growth runs rampant through most of finance, and teenage "prodigies". [4]

Basically with only $1.5 billion you could control the value of $500 billion dollars worth of assets - on any one day - that's it. This is how you get bubbles. This is how you can have stock market booms and busts.

Valuation leverage allows you to bid up prices for any stock using less than 2% in actual value, selling to the next tulip buyer whenever they come in trading. [5] If you had to use 100% cash - well there just ain't enough to go around my friends!

Startups?

Invest $20K just like YC does, valuing a company at $1 million - pre-product and sometimes even pre-team! The million dollars just ain't there yet - but everybody - look yonder - valuation and investor interest over the horizon!

Venture Funds?

Instagram received a $50 million cash injection which valued it at a cool $500+ million - pre-revenue. $500 million in cash wasn't actually in the coffers (or on the horizon) but Facebook look - just look - at our valuation/predicted growth - you gotta buy us out (with cash of course). And double the price while you're at it.

~2% of the world's value actually exchanged hands yesterday on the world markets.

~0.5% of market participants actually moved the prices that the rest of the world was priced at.

Hold ~2% of the world - and control it all.

Valuation is bullshit - it's like leverage without the cost of capital.

Sources:

[1] - https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AAPL

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_(finance)

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(finance)

[4] - http://xkcd.com/605/

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_capitalization
That's a great metric. Was trying to measure The East India Company by this metric, but it's surprisingly hard to do so.
Ask HN : How can you do quality control on crowdsource data?
I'm wondering how can you do quality control/ quality check on a crowdsource data which will be encoded into an application?
I understand that I don't really know what I will be getting for my 99 cents, but whenever I'm looking at apps I'm able to justify it pretty easily by saying that it's only 99 cents. How much risk can there really be if it only costs me 99 cents?
Couldn't get passed running rvm in my terminal on OS X =/
I think the seed-stage boom is because companies generally need much less money than they used to. There are no significant costs except salaries for software businesses. So why take more money? It is more a reflection that the larger VCs have less opportunities, so seed stage will continue to grow.
Wow, order of magnitude cheaper than S3 (1 cent per month vs. 12-14 cents for S3). Data transfer priced the same.

Drawback is "jobs typically complete in 3.5 to 4.5 hours."

Seeing as how people tend to be pack rats, I can see this being huge.
I think one of the most interesting parts of this is how they plan to ensure that people do not use it for transient backup: https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_de...

Deleting data from Amazon Glacier is free if the archive being deleted has been stored for three months or longer. If an archive is deleted within three months of being uploaded, you will be charged an early deletion fee. In the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, you would be charged a prorated early deletion fee of $0.03 per gigabyte deleted within three months.
It will be interesting to know if they will upgrade AWS Storage Gateway to use this kind of backend instead of S3
http://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/
Android Development in Vim
Thinking exactly the same, Glacier would be a good place for a backup off family photos and videos.
Why you need to stop saying yes
Sure, regular users KNOW how to scroll to the top, but why make them? I think that fixed headers add some good convenience, especially on long pages.
How algorithms will help us spend, spend, spend
What does "99.999999999% durability" mean? Does it mean they allow themselves to lose one byte per terabyte on average?
Nice to hear your answers, but until you find out product/market fit no one can predict which way to go.
No stop it! Don't defend autoconf, it is not worth it and the software does not deserve it. Users of autoconf, that is developers that try to use that POS to build their software definitely experiences its pains.

It is not just that M4 is a horribly ugly, badly, inconsistent language. You also have about a million leaky caches in the build process to deal with. Autoconf rewrites the build scripts in three stages, each which is cached and also keeps an autom4te.cache directory around. So what happens is that you update something in the M4 build script and then have to spend hours hunting down why the change didn't change anything because some stupid autoconf cache wasn't flushed.

What autoconf has done is to separate free software developers into two categories. Those who can hack the source (the .c and .h files) and those who understand the "autoconf magic." It should be telling that people refer to it as "magic" - it's a fing build system, not rocket science.

The only reason this ugly piece of software has lived on is because people treat it as some kind of magical device and inertia. Configuring and building software is an easy problem. It gets even easier if you finally decide to drop support for 30 year old unices that no one uses. The autoconf team consistently refuses to do that which why the software wont ever become better.

CMake, SCons, Waf and probably half a dozen more tools all do a much better job configuring software than autoconf ever will. People really need to try those alternatives and I'm sure they will realize autoconf needs to die, die, DIE.
This is amazing! Just ~3 weeks ago I finally broke down and started using S3 to store my digital photos and other such crap.

Sure hope transferring 10 or 20 gigabytes of data from S3 to Glacier is easy.
Ahh, in an attempt to convey humor it came across as snarky-- which is exactly what I feared would happen. I have a feeling this misunderstanding will likely be perpetual and that is not what I want. So, I decided to word it differently to assure that this isn't perceived as an attack but rather an attempt to rouse whatever it is inside of us that encourages us to aspire to be better. I am beyond glad you were first to comment!
I lost my private key. Now what?

I'm using my friend's laptop; I don't have my private key with me. Now what?

I'm travelling and forgot to bring my private key with me. Now what?

(Similar questions apply to password managers as well, but I'm curious as to what the problems/solutions are for PKI.)
Seeing a self-taught guy with 6 months coding experience writing software at a medical lab testing facility makes me a bit nervous. The need for proper security in that area is (IMO) even more important than for credit card and financial processing, and I just don't trust a guy with only 6 months experience to do it correctly. Nothing against him, but I think it's too complicated of a subject to learn in 6 months with no real world experience.
On Telling My Son That He Is A Geek
I had to look that up :S

Eww well... I'm male, straight and not into kids. Maybe boring but I guess it's good to be acceptable.

Cheerio.
Giving computers to young children is one thing. I would think twice about giving them unrestricted internet however. I kinda like the lego raspberry computer idea combined with the 'showing CLI first' idea someone had here (obviously not for children below the age of 7 or so).
I think it means there is a small chance enough hard drives might fail at the same time that there happen to be no backups of those drives.

They make so many backups so quickly that there is only a 0.00000000001% (I didn't count the zeros) chance of this occuring.
Annoyingly, quite a few of the removed features have not since been satisfactorily replicated by apps; or else they were once, but those apps have since been removed. I'm not even sure what the point of Facebook apps is anymore, since the useful ones seem to all be gone. (OK, I guess interfacing with websites is useful. The useful Facebook-internal ones all seem to be gone.)
I'm not surprised. I got the expiry date of my credit card wrong. It stores it and will not let you change overwrite or delete it. In the end I just had to top up offline till I could move carrier.
Kinda: "In the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies."
I've looked at splitwise. ( http://splitwise.com )
11 9's. Impressive.
SEO vs PPC - War on two Fronts
Storage experts: I'd love to know more about what might be backing this service.

What kind of system has Amazon most likely built that takes 3-4 hours to perform retrieval? What are some examples of similar systems, and where are they installed?
Why is Google blocking shopping results in the US for vitamins?
Goto Google.

Search for Vitamins.

Click on the shopping results.

Zero results.
Coderwall is losing its way
What's particularly awesome, is that this likely represents an upper bound on cost. It will only go down as time goes on.
Or click field. Go to the menu option Edit -> Paste. Let's see how they are going to dodge that with Javascript?
> man ssh

doesn't imply being "LEET".
This is a nice story but there are some hidden issues around here. The ones that want to get into programming should be aware of these:

It's not an easy trip.. it's not just six months... it's a lifetime. Yes you might get a job in 6 months but then you will have to work even harder to keep that job and to be in the game. You will never stop learning... you will have to constantly adapt yourself to the new technologies otherwise you will end up being the guy hated by everyone for your crappy code that's a pain to be maintained.

Yes you might learn Ruby or any other programming language and you can solve problems and build stuff... so basically you can do your job.... but there's more to programming. You should not just read a ruby book and learn the syntax and hey presto you are a developer. You should put some time in learning how software works, learning some algorithms and so on. It's not about one programming language, it's about programming in general. Programming languages are just tools we use to achieve a goal. For example, you can't be a car mechanic by learning how to use a wrench.. you need to know how to use more tools and, the most important thing, learn how to fix an issue using the most appropriate tool.
Just use SVG for logo's and icons. I use it all the time. They even render better than reduced PNG logo's.
Physicists demonstrate that 15=3x5 about half of the time
Bringing Touch Editing to Office Web Apps on Windows 8 and iOS Tablets
From: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3

Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years....
Which of course means that (if they're telling the truth) the probability of losing your data mostly comes from really big events: collapse of civilization, global thermonuclear war, Amazon being bought by some entity that just wants to melt its servers down for scrap, etc. (Whose probability is clearly a lot more than 10^-11 per year; the big bang was only on the order of 10^10 years ago.)
My guess - varchar(15)

Adobe does the same thing with the horrible license-management selfcare site. Which, as far as I can tell, is some kind of SAP frontend.
Haha, no, Vim in replace mode. But yeah, artist-mode is awesome.
True, I use Debian myself and can't stand OS X. I meant that for an average end-user, OS X makes more sense.
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month.

What would be absolutely fascinating is a pay-before-you-go storage service — data cryonics.

Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.
I hope they can get the access time down from 3-5 hours to about 1 hour - that's the difference for me between it being a viable alternative for storing backups of my client's web sites or not.

I might create a script that uploads everything to Glacier and just keeps a couple of the latest backups on S3 though.
I have spent a fair bit of time reading the PCI standards and I have never seen such a requirement. I suppose it is possible that some sort of independent auditor is making that call but it isn't in the standard anywhere I can see. (Auditors seem to have a huge amount of discretion here.)
To be honest, I think this is true for every profession, not just programming.

If you want to stay on top, you have to continually improve your game.

Or you can be that guy in the corner who got left behind when the factory tanked and he suddenly found himself unemployable.
Do they not have curry or just not call it curry? Admittedly I don't think I'm ever eaten anything like that when in America, but never really thought about it..