skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reality is we spend most of our waking lives at work. Other than those we had before we started, most of our friends (and even romantic partners) will be made there. Enforced work socializing is counterproductive, but enforced non-socializing is even worse. A good workplace should accept that people are social, that being able to play around for a few minutes in the middle of the day makes you more rather than less productive. That a workplace offers nerf guns does not prove that it will be a nice place to work, but it does at least show you that it's not stuck in joyless "professionalism" that would guarantee that it isn't one.
Got it. I'll take a look - thanks!
Review Forward, get contributor status
Adam has 1-2 orders of magnitude more wealth than Charlie outside of Quora (due to earlier/bigger role at Facebook), so it's probably reasonable that only Adam invested.
Exactly. It's not a bad thing, it's a pretty fundamental basis of the Internet and the reason we get so much for free. At the end of the day it is still a win for consumers. I'm glad it works that way, since I'd rather view ads then pay a monthly subscription to Google (or would I? At least most people would).
Issues I have with HTML5:

- Javascript

- Javascript

- Javascript

- Fragmentation like no other

- Lack of APIs

- Sandboxed environment

- A bunch of morons writing "frameworks" without a clue of computer science (same thing as many popular Wordpress PHP plugins written by people who have no clue of even how memory allocation is supposed to work)

- A bunch of other morons copying and pasting the work of other morons.

- No real memory management

- No real anything or poor support at anything (no sockets, no primitive types, no threads, cross domain BS)

- Internet Explorer

- Javascript

- Internet Explorer

- Javascript

...

It's just not what the foundation was meant for.

It only took Steve Jobs talking about how bad flash was and closing the endless array of development options that we have outside Objective-C and HTML5 to make the world try to reinvent the wheel in javascript, all the while ignoring the fact we have more powerful desktop computers than ever, all the while putting more money in the pockets of those that run cloud infrastructure.

I hope more guys like Zuck come out on the record and let the world know this is ludacris, that all these decades working on out of this world compiler optimizations and technology that's light years away from the browser can't be forgotten.

Yes, we need to be in the browser, but give me a break, Javascript?

It's just sad seeing the turn of events of our industry going in this direction, I'm glad of this whole "App" revolution and Zuckerberg saying this at his first appearance after the IPO, I hope it sobers up a bunch of decision makers.
Issues I have with HTML5:

- Javascript
- Javascript
- Javascript
- Fragmentation like no other
- Lack of APIs
- Sandboxed environment
- No real memory management
- No real anything or poor support at anything
- Javascript

It's just not what the foundation was meant for.

It only took Steve Jobs talking about how bad flash was and closing the endless array of development options that we have outside Objective-C and HTML5 to make the world try to reinvent the wheel in javascript, all the while ignoring the fact we have more powerful desktop computers than ever, all the while putting more money in the pockets of those that run cloud infrastructure.

I hope more guys like Zuck come out on the record and let the world know this is ludacris, that all these decades working on out of this world compiler optimizations and technology that's light years away from the browser can't be forgotten.

Yes, we need to be in the browser, but give me a break, Javascript?
Yes, URL?
By 'tough problem', do you mean something that requires a lot of 'breakthrough new science'? And or has a huge impact on the world? As far as the former goes, how technical a company is may change throughout its lifetime. For example, at its inception, Google's algorithm was definitely an improvement over what Yahoo did, but didn't exactly not come out of the blue ( the story doesn't really bear repeating here). I think as these companies grow, the need to improve their service and just its sheer size imposes high demand for developing 'new stuff'. So maybe a lot of companies that are deemed 'trivial' today just havn't grown to the point where they need to solve some 'tough technical problems.'

A second note about just the ability to tackle hard problems. I think there's a deeper cycle going on here: discoveries in the traditional sciences that fundamentally change how we see the world, and manipulate more parts of it. Most of the tech advancement in the 20th century ( in the field of computers anyways ) can be traced to new ideas in physics developed in the early 20th century. So I hypothesize that we are a in a lull period where 'nobody' has figured out how to apply what we know about the world in drastically different ways. ( I don't read enough literature to say that no one in the last x decades has made discoveries as significant as those made in the few decades prior to that )

As far as impact on the world goes, sometimes at a company's inception, it's not so obvious that it'll change the (1st) world in significant ways. A pretty computer for the select few who knows what a computer is? A website to buy old books? which by the way looked like this:

http://library.corporate-ir.net/library/17/176/176060/mediai...

So I think when a company has a potential to shift the world into a different ( yet to be conceived ) state, then it is hard to measure its significance by standards of our world.

To bring the ramble to its final stretch, I think the bar to start a company nowadays is a lot lower. And despite how worldly a late teens early 20s person may be, if (s)he had the time and resource to learn programming (or some other discipline), then (s)he probably spend his/her entire life in school, and the problems (s)he experienced, though significant in the context of his/her life thus far, may appear 'trivial' to the greater world at large. So the space of problems (s)he is motivated to solve is just far smaller than an older dude.

And with that I finally shut up.
Note to anyone that doesn't do much crypto: You have to compress before encrypting, compressing after encrypting has no effect.

(Reason: because encrypted data is [should be] indistinguishable from random data, and random data does not compress)
Have you tried JRuby? You get all your Ruby on top of the JVM. By a number of anecdotal accounts, it's quite fast once you get past the JIT warm-up period. You also get the ability to use native Java libraries from your Ruby code, which gives you a really nice transition mechanism if you decide to move towards a pure Java solution.
The SSH protocol is nothing like TLS. The SSH security model is nothing like the TLS security model. Pornin's guess about Thai and Juliano's attack does not break the TLS authentication model; it breaks the confidentiality guarantees TLS makes to the application layer. If you authenticated TLS with certificates the way SSH authenticates with keys, you wouldn't worry about the compression attack.

So, not so much.
So wait: because these workers are Chinese, and their working conditions are better than other Chinese factories, they shouldn't be demanding better conditions?

Got it. So because people lost the genetic lottery and were born in China, they're lesser than you, and don't deserve the same rights and privileges that you do.

I'd like to see you try and work in these conditions and then try to have the same opinion. This Western attitude of shitting on "3rd-world" countries just appals me. As the child of immigrant parents in Canada, I'm absolutely grateful that I was able to escape this world. But I'm sure you'd love to send us back.
Reminds me of a piece that I read on Marc Andreessen's blog back in 2007. Now I see that it was written by Ben Horowitz. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it how long it took me to find this, like 10 minutes. Anyway, quoting:

"Once WorldCom started committing accounting fraud to prop up their numbers, all of the other telecoms had to either (a) commit accounting fraud to keep pace with WorldCom's blistering growth rate, or (b) be viewed as losers with severe consequences.

How severe were the consequences for not breaking the law? Well, like a baseball player who refuses to take steroids, CEO Mike Armstrong of AT&T did not keep pace with the cheaters. As a reward for his honesty and integrity, he was widely ridiculed in the press prior to being fired and AT&T, perhaps America's most valuable brand, was acquired for cheap. Now you see why Barry Bonds needed something to help him keep pace with Mark McGwire."

http://web.archive.org/web/20090621225533/http://blog.pmarca...
Scrum is focused almost exclusively on delivery. Every sprint, you should be delivering working features. It's not that hard: every sprint, you commit to a set of stories to finish before the next sprint. Every day you meet briefly to tell everyone how you're progressing and to air out any impediments. That's about it. To me, scrum is stripping process down to the bare minimum you need to be effective.
Oops, I misread your comment quite heavily. Apologies for the extremely redundant follow-up!
Almost no hardware audio decoders use DSPs, or at least actually need to, since about a decade or more now.

The manufacturers you mention use DSPs for bad reasons - usually the inertia of software already using a coprocessor and not being willing to license a new codec for the general purpose core. Audio decoding and encoding is an extremely low percentage of available CPU, and it's just not worth off-loading it.

Video is another matter, at least when talking about HD. It's still very much worth using special purpose DSPs for that.

For audio, the existence of hardware DSPs is simply not a barrier to entry.
You're right, but again: there's advice people get to compress deliberately, not to save space in messages but to make cryptanalysis more difficult.
I thought compressing after encryption was a waste of time because encrypted text shouldn't contain compressible patterns
The effectiveness of scrum really depends on the team size. The larger the team, the more bureaucracy is needed to manage it.
If you try to write rails and ruby in Java you will leave angry and disappointed. I would suggest you look for a Java-oriented framework that leverages Java's strengths (I love wicket for the way it uses java's strong typing to enforce properly reusable components, and make upgrades easy); that way even if you return to ruby you'll have learned something.
Yeah, Libya under Qadafi had the highest human development index rating in Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...

Iran ended up going Islamist after a monarchy installed by the US and Britain, unseating a democratically elected government, failed. Hopefully Libya won't go that way, but wouldn't be that surprising.
Relevant: http://www.ekoparty.org/2012/juliano-rizzo.php
While I agree that the pharma business model sucks, the real problem is still the rep/doctor relationship, and not the research and marketing.

Convincing a doctor to prescribe a medication with no noticeable benefit but that is orders of magnitude more expensive than the out-of-patent generic is, to the pharma industry, a victimless crime, but it drives care costs way up.

Insurance companies are not shining bastions of consumer choice, but if I had to pick between the pharma/doctor complex and the insurance companies, I'd side with the insurance companies on this one.

The worst part of this whole scenario is that many patients are on medications they really do not need, and I had to shop around a lot to find a doctor that wasn't prescribing things to me that I didn't need.
You still paid for the device generating revenue directly to Amazon. The ads are just supplementing a discount on the product. Google is not making money off of the Android devices they don't sell, although it is changing as they start building and selling their own hardware.
Pagedown is the Markdown editor that Stack Overflow uses. I've used it - nothing fancy, does the job.

http://code.google.com/p/pagedown/
intrigued, but the blog is down :(
Ten things I wish I knew earlier about the Linux command line P. 1
We all learn new things over time as we use applications with a vast amount of possibilities. Of course, some of those things would have been so useful if we had known them earlier. Here are 10 command line tricks that I wish I had learned much sooner.

Note: these tricks apply to bash, which is the default shell on most Linux systems. If you’re using a different shell, they may not work for you. If you don’t know which shell you have, it’s probably bash, so go ahead and try them!
It is very hard for me to believe that you would have spotted this flaw immediately had anyone pointed out to you that TLS supported compression.

I'm not claiming that I'd have noticed this particular attack. I'm saying that having compression in a supposedly secure transport layer was an obviously bad idea even before it was clear how it could be exploited. I don't need to get into a car accident to know that driving at night with my car's headlights turned off is a bad idea.

There is well-regarded (though not by me) crypto advice recommending that people compress before encrypting, to destroy structure in the plaintext.

There's a huge difference between compressing data and compressing an authentication channel. This is why compression should not be included in the secure channel -- it should be left up to the higher-level code to decide if compression is (a) completely pointless or (b) will leak information dangerously.
Interesting position, thinking of Zynga as a commercial business virus.
Wait, who is suffering because of doped up cyclists? (The insider trading investor does seem different as `lsc` talks about elsewhere in these comments)
I'm not seeing how JRuby is much more efficient: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Some tests are faster and some are slower. Nowhere near as efficient as Java.
I swear to you - cold fusion is real. I have a reactor in my basement.
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Heh, anyone else notice the proposed attack strongly resembles Level 8 in the last Stripe CTF?
The evolution of cheating in chess
I'm going to speculate for a bit, and say that some of the "Frighteningly Ambitious" ideas probably involve hardware or hardware/software combinations. Kickstarter is full of updates on how getting designs into production is harder than expected.
> Hollywood "guess the password one character at a time" animations

Did you see the BEAST attack? Exactly one byte at a time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTqAIDVUvrU
This paper published in 2002 does discuss this attack.
http://www.iacr.org/cryptodb/data/paper.php?pubkey=3091

"... both the SSH and TLS protocols support an option for on-the-fly compression. Potential security implications of using compression algorithms are of practical importance to people designing systems that might use both compression
and encryption."
Taking in-app marketing to the next level: The Starbucks example
Zuckerberg is right. HTML5 isn't suitable for the direction Facebook is going which is photos (hence why they bought Instagram).

LocalStorage quotas cannot be made bigger than 5MB[1].

I remember trying this Mozilla-built webapp[2] out in Google Chrome, it just didn't work.

1. http://htmlui.com/blog/2011-08-23-5-obscure-facts-about-html...

2. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-edi...
I'm confused about the no sockets (WebSockets) and no threads (Web workers) points. These standards may be immature, but they do exist.
As we read news reports about violent responses to the video, from people who seem to be quite confused about who produced the video, it's important for all of us to remember the basic issue here. The basic issue is whether people in free countries, like most readers of Hacker News, are going to be able to enjoy the right of free speech throughout their country, on any subject, or whether any American or Dutch person or other person accustomed to free speech who happens to be within reach of attack by a crazy foreign person has to prepare for war just to continue to exercise free speech. On my part, I'm going to continue to comment on public policy based on verifiable facts and reason and logic, even if that seems offensive. I am not going to shrink from saying that people in backward, poorly governed countries that could never have invented the Internet have no right to kill and destroy just because someone in a free country laughs or scorns at their delusions. The people who are destroying diplomatic buildings and killing diplomats are declining to use thoughtful discussion to show that they are anything other than blights on humankind.

AFTER EDIT: Reporting by the New York Times, citing other news organizations, on the origin of the video and how viewers became aware of it:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/obscure-film-moc...
Oh wow, Rails runs in JRuby. Interesting...
I think crypto is possibly the best example in all of software development and/or computer science of how dangerous "unknown unknowns" are, and how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (although threads are a serious competitor for the latter trophy).

I've studied cryptography theory, and I've implemented various ciphers and attacks, and the more I learn the more certain I become that I would never, ever use any of my own crypto code in production.
The excuses I've heard for it include 1) can't do compression after the crypto, and 2) it reduces ciphertext available to attackers. SSH and PGP do it too.
Skip the Basics
Sounds like they had some donors they could soak with unreasonable expenses.
> but it does at least show you that it's not stuck in joyless "professionalism" that would guarantee that it isn't one.

I agree with most of your comment but I disagree with that. I think you have to define what a "joyless, professional" work environment really means. To me, it means nobody enjoys their work, nobody feels challenged, nobody feels heard, rather everyone is just a cog/code monkey. If that's the case, throwing in some nerf guns and free soda won't change anything.

However, to you, a "joyless, professional" work environment seems to mean one where people aren't friendly with each other, and nobody has any fun when they're at work but not currently working. In that case, some toys actually might help a good deal.

So I guess it's a subjective topic and both are equally valid definitions depending on your values.
Do they do this because Russians are somehow genetically inclined to dishonesty? Or is it because the opportunities for honest work with a decent pay in Russia are a lot worse than in the west?

I postulate that even if the 1st generation immigrants might bring some cultural baggage with them, their children will mostly share the culture of their host country (modulo ethic cookery & speaking an extra language).

BTW we don't have to theorize anything, as the reason that there are so many Russians in Israel is that it was fairly easy for them to come here if they could prove they had some Jewish heritage (for many of which a very faint one, like one grandparent being a non-practicing Jew) & we don't see this doomsday scenario you predicted.
We've got a solid 5 with what we're building at LocalSense: https://localsense.com -- but it contains elements of #9 which is strangely high on the list.
> context is irrelevant to the purpose of ownership

Context is extremely relevant to the point of ownership.

I own a knife that can be used to kill. But I use it to cut food. Is it a weapon?

I have poison in my home! It's a detergent I use for cleaning. Am I in possession of a weapon? It could be used as such.

OP may have a gun as a deterrent of some sort, despite not planning to ever use it.

Context is everything. And stating otherwise is - frankly - bullshit.
Could Amazon be theoretically more efficient - sure. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised, if over time, the time requirement for owning (30 days) and the round off period (To the month, rounded down) and the fee (12%) is rounded down - but, this is a new service that did not exist before - so from that perspective, it's great. All the things that you used to be able to do (lend someone your EC2 instance) still exists.
Yep. Great paper. Thanks for finding this.
Actually what the author describes is a natural path of evolution for that team. Scrum (as a process) contains the possibility of changing the scrum rules themselves - although it is strongly recommended one does that only after they get experienced (e.g. they actually manage to get shippable product each iteration).

When the focus is on the process itself and not on delivery there is something rotten in Amsterdam.

Scrum can be a micro-manager's dream (think of the visibility on who is doing what at almost hourly level) - case in which one can end up with focus on the process not on result.
The problem is legit video offering sucks. It is loaded with thousand of DRM hoops and constantly plagued by turf wars between content providers and delivery, so any given moment any content you enjoy can be gone because two suits somewhere couldn't agree about some royalty payment.

If they ever took their collective heads out of their collective asses and offered me a convenient DRM-less subscription service that would enable me to enjoy my favorite shows and movies online without enduring inconveniences that makes one think it was designed by TSA - I'd be super-happy to use that and give my money to them. But the aren't doing it! Instead, they pump money into stupid anti-piracy schemes and starting a war on their own clients.
Ask HN: Best data-store service with a JSONP/CORS REST API?
I've got a few client-side apps in JavaScript and I'm looking for a place to store the data. I don't want to run my own persistence API for every one of these little experiments, but I need to have access to the records they create, so I can't use localStorage.

I'm aware of Amazon S3[1] and I'm also looking at MongoHQ[2]. They both have a REST API, but I'm not sure they support JSONP or Cross Origin Resource Sharing. Do you know of any data-store service with an API like that?

Thanks
Apache Cocoon, MVC framework designed for RAD
Just keep going and refrain from copying verbatim other people's config and using too many plugins.
500 Million Android devices activated globally
Thanks for your views on BGP - a lot of my knowledge of it comes from post-incident beers with our network grey-beards when I worked at an ISP, so my views are probably somewhat biased. There is nothing like a network explosion at an ISP to get people ranting about BGP, but I'll admit that the ranting is from a place of anger and frustration and largely venting rather then a fair technical assessment.
And everything Apple spends R&D money on is something that may one day end up in customers hands; whereas MS R&D often never sees the light of day, or gets canned, and Google spend a lot of their R&D making custom hardware for data centers.
I could have sworn there was another post with the exact same title a month back.
I fully agree with your post. But do mind sharing what process you changed to then? Did it and does it still work?
HTML5 makes sense for what it is meant for. Web development. It is not a desktop or mobile app replacement technology. As long as one is clear about that, everything is fine.
[1] http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/APIRes...

[2] http://support.mongohq.com/api