skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a different pass for basically everything. The strength depends on how much I care about my account at the service. I've been known to do stuff like "<servicename>sucks" when I really don't care about it. Everything somewhat important is longish, with some capitals/numbers/special chars.

I have FF remember all of my passes basically (on my own computer with a good password on it.) I make fairly heavy use of "forgot pass" functions to make up for forgetting some passes.
This is true. There is no way to merge contacts (if it auto-adds the same person as two different people), which makes reasonably contact lists frustrating.
NOKIA 5610 XPRESSMUSIC PINK 3G UNLOCKED
Nokia 5610 XpressMusic comes ready to rock with an iconic Music Slider key making music easy to access with a flick of the thumb. Aluminum side panels accent the all-black high gloss finish and large 2.2-inch, 16 million color display.
For sites like this one, I use one of two or three easy to remember passwords. For banking sites and such, I create strong passwords, which I keep written down (the Bruce Schneier approach).
Displaying the policy before a low karma user can reply would be nice.

If you find yourself in that section of code, the little "help" link that shows after the edit box when "edit"ing could also be displayed when you are starting a reply.
Random username and password for each site, generated by http://duckduckgo.com/?q=pw

I keep them in an encrypted file on an encrypted disk. I let my browser remember them though, and I have the frequently used ones (ssh, gmail, etc.) memorized.
Official Google Blog: "This site may harm your computer" on every search result??
Amen. It amazes me how little this has caught on with the technical people I know. You can have your cake and eat it too: you only need to remember a single password, but you get to keep that password private. And you can use as many different computers and browsers as you want.
Here is the official explanation from Google:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-yo...
GDP was down only 0.965% from Q3
Why would any sane person multiply that number by 4 and report it! That would be like taking my kwh consumption during the peak August consumption multiplying by 12 and calling that my annual electric bill...NOT!
For web sites I don't want to access from my phone, I use the PasswordMaker plugin for Firefox, which generates site specific passwords from a single master password that never gets saved anywhere (except maybe swap space, I haven't looked into that). The only problem I've run into were overzealous input sanitizers on some sites that refused some of the characters in the generated passwords.

For really important passwords I use strong random passwords with a security copy on paper stored in a safe place. Depending on the password and how often I need it that may be the safe at work, a binder with all the important related personal documents, or that place all people use to keep valuable small pieces of paper, the wallet in my pocket (there usually without a full domain name).

Then I use old safe passwords which I no longer use for their original purpose but still remember as passwords for situations where PasswordMaker is no option.
The Mac's Keychain Access program (Utilities folder) is pretty good for this. Most programs I use directly support it, e.g. Mail passwords, and web site passwords in OmniWeb. You can also add your own passwords or secure notes without having a program "support" the keychain.

Sync of keychains is possible, but only if you pay for MobileMe (nee iTools/.Mac).

Unfortunately, Firefox uses its own password manager on the Mac instead of a keychain.
Perhaps creating a virtual machine (Xen, VMWare, whatever) on your development box and using that to test restoring your backups?
Houston this is the Space Shuttle Humor, we're currently set to pass approximately 1000 miles over weegee's head.

Humor, you are clear for orbit.
Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs.

Wow, one character. That was one expensive character.
Send Me Your Nominations for Algorithms That Changed The World
As its been said a million times before, hardware is cheap. Creating a system that can utilize the cheapest Celeron servers you have with the flick of a switch is what you really need to create.

Adding a few more servers is much cheaper than downtime.
I'm actually quite surprised at the lack of mention of KeePass in this comments thread: http://keepass.info/

I've been using it for years at this point, and I love it - it's very well supported, and is fast and straightforward to use - both for creating new accounts and recalling old accounts. In fact, I don't know my password to the majority of sites that I am signed up for, and instead use a randomly generated string.

That helps my peace of mind in cases where sites like monster.com get hacked - I don't need to change every password on every site, only that one.

[Edit] - By the way, Version 2 is written in Mono-compatible .NET, which means that it is accessible as a cross platform application. (It's not quite Python or Perl, but it works for me)
You're right that we probably shouldn't jump to conclusions, but it doesn't look good.

And human error shouldn't really be possible if your backups are automated and you periodically do test restores.
So your price includes the perks of working for yourself. For example, you would take a deal that included enough cash & stock with no work requirement / vesting.
These are some of the best arguments for 0-based indexing, and I agree that these are very useful properties. In my day-to-day programming though, the 1-based indexing has some (admittedly, less math-based) advantages too. For instance when I have an array my brain appreciates the simplicity of the "oh, this array has 10 elements. What's the last element? Number 10! Yay, that was easy" thought process.

In many cases I don't care about specifying boundary conditions at all; I will just use something along the lines of

for i, v in ipairs(t) do something_interesting(i, v) end

or even just a map or fold or some other iteration technique where I'm not explicitly specifying boundary conditions. If I'm implementing a heap or some other data structure which uses calculations to interact with an array I will be double-checking my math anyway because I don't trust myself to get it right the first time, 0-based indexing or not ;)
Wow. Someone broke the Google by slashing on it.
Clever analogy, but it oversimplifies the problem. There is a precise standard unit for height, but it's impossible to create a precise standard unit for knowledge.
The "History of Lua" paper written a few years ago for a presentation at HOPL is also great reading and gives good insight into why Lua is the way it is.

http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/hopl.pdf
I'd rather imagine college with a reasonable grading system. Your grade should be EITHER the average (weighted, perhaps) of your homework and test scores (like most grades are now) OR the average of your test scores, whichever is higher. This would allow people who understand the material to not waste time doing homework so long as their test scores are satisfactory. Also, assignments and tests should be hard enough that getting a 50% on them isn't considered failing; grade inflation is rampant and frankly stupid. Letter grades should be done away with, or only used as a shorthand way of expressing a final grade: making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic. GPA should be done away with. Nearly all university grades are done on a computer, and computing the average of a decimal percentage is no harder than assigning a score for letter grades and computing the mean of those on a scale of 4.0 (or 5.0, etc.). Also free beer at college would be nice.
We call that "brainstorming sessions".
Not extremely sophisticated from the generation side but SecretBook for Mac is really pretty clean. iPhone version as well.

http://bookshelfapps.com/
Incidentally, I'm glad to know that I can now tell my clients that I have a Google-class QA procedure: I make my changes directly on the live site, without testing them, and I promise not to blow up the home page for more than an hour!

Six sigma, baby!

Seriously, though: We've all made similar mistakes before (though, after the first few times, we usually try to catch them on the dev server or the staging server). The trick for Google will be to ensure that this one is not made again.
Google Search Not Serving | TechJaws
The point in polygon problem for arbitrary polygons I believe was first solved by Robert Sedgewick and published in his awesome algorithms book... it is discussed here...
http://bit.ly/i1u1
In most computer applications today we assume we can easily tell whether or not a point is within (or without)...
But I think Robert published the first algorithm on how...
I said the typical city has a rate 10X to 100X that of a Victorian era European city. Lower crime cities (Boston, San Francisco) have around 10X the rate, high crime cities (Baltimore, Philly, Detroit, DC) have had crime rates up to 100X.

City size has nothing to do with crime rates. City size peaked in the 1950's, a time with much lower crime rates. Philadelphia has a slightly smaller population now than in 1910. Yet the homicide rate in 1911 was 4.4 per 100,000. In 2006 it was 27.7. Likewise the homicide rate in Baltimore went from 5.8 to 43.3.

Yes, homicide rates have come down a bit off their 1990 high. But they are still nowhere near 1900 levels. Also, homicide rates understate the violence problem. The rate is partly kept down by people knowing to stay out of the city.

Finally, part of the awfulness of suburban design comes from dealing with the violence problem. Most suburbs have strong zoning laws requiring large lots and no multi-family homes. This is done explicitly to keep out the underclass.

If cities existed that combined strong law enforcement, school choice, and city-like urban design, I expect they would be extraordinarily popular. Unfortunately, such cities are nearly impossible to create in today's political climate.
I'd love to see grading and ranking and sorting separated from teaching and learning. IMO grading (as opposed to guidance and correction) is destructive to real learning.

At the least, we should separate the teacher from the grader. To me it is just nutty that the person who teaches should be the one who proclaims how well the student has learned.
We're just getting Shotput off the ground. We're going to do our first class this summer. Hope we do you proud!
"Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes." from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-yo...
Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Not only mentioned, but likened to Digg. People may have been expecting that what passes on Digg would pass here.
In Safari, videos don't start playing until you visit the tab. Good feature.
KeePassX(http://www.keepassx.org/) is an excellent free cross-platform password manager for storing user names, passwords, urls, attachments and comments in one single database.The database is encrypted either with AES (alias Rijndael) or Twofish encryption algorithm using a 256 bit key.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
what, no love for cuil?
... or just use http://clive.sourceforge.net/ from the command line.
did google also tweak their spam filter? anyone seeing more emails that would not normally go to spam being sent to spam?
"I think people need to worry less about their version control system and think more about writing useful code."

If you seriously think those are in opposition, you either need more experience with version control (preferably a modern one) or more experience with coding in a real environment with many people. Possibly both.

There really isn't any two ways about that. The only two ways you can think version control is worthless is if you've only used worthless version control (Hi, Visual Source Safe!) or you're caught on the wrong end of a Blub paradox.

I have a guy at work who thinks version control is beneath him, too. I say him and his twenty distinct-and-slightly-different versions of critical scripts that require huge maintenance (often incompletely done) for every trivial change are wrong, and I end up paying the price.
Short: consider a user flow that changes the index page for returning visitors.

Response: i think they may be on to something. Subtly implemented this could really make me wander back to a site, at least for one more visit.

Unfortunately this could also go the way of the pop-up and just end up annoying the hell out of me as every site decides to bring a call-to-action to it's returning visitors.
And somehow he didn't even mention that GMail is free and comes with an email address, while Outlook you have to pay for and still requires email hosting (ideally on Exchange if you want to use all the features)
I'd think about it, but those things don't happen 99% of the time. I'm always willing to listen.

Having worked in M&A / financial due diligence before this, acquisitions are like an anal probe; they're never clean, simple or quick. They're sloppy, tedious and unpleasant. It's sort of similar to raising money in a sense that it's very possible that real work is put on hold for months. Ugh.

And the other thing is, I'm just a big fan of events and helping people have fun. When people tell me they used TicketStumbler and had a great time at X concert or Y hockey game, or a Dad comments how he took his son to his first baseball game, that means more to me than any dollar amount.
You can either use a website to manage your passwords or a USB drive. I use keepass to keep some of my passwords on a USB stick...

Not perfect, not 100% secure (nothing is), but always accessible :)
Ask HN: Teaching a non-programmer web development?
I have an old friend who called me last night to tell me about an idea he had for a web application that he would like to pursue (it's an interesting idea in itself but that's not the point of this post).

My friend has a marketing and business background and is the president of a networking group at his college and is actually majoring in Entrepreneurial Studies so that is clearly his strong point.

He wants to learn about web development. He doesn't have any experience with it (hasn't even done HTML/CSS).

My background includes HTML/CSS, Photoshop, and Rails so I have a good grasp of start to finish development, so I could help him in that direction, but I'm not sure if that should be the path a person completely new to all things programming should take. I'm tempted to start him on PHP and find him some good screencasts to follow along to.

What path do you think I should push him along and what resources do you think would be valuable to a non-programmer who wants to learn web development?
I use http://passwordsafe.com to manage my password. Its good enough for me.
"StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs"

"Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."

Sounds like an opportunity to add a new acceptance test on items in that list :-)
I prefer GMail as well, but you're not making a very strong case for it. Outlook has its benefits and:

* The search has improved in Outlook 2007, plus there are 3rd party search tools and plugins (like Google Desktop, of course)

* Labels/Folders is not a big difference, and with a proper Exchange server set up, the Outlook rules do run on the server not just your client

* IMAP/POP is not the same as ActiveSync or Blackberry Server support. It's a big difference (Push vs Scheduled Pull) and is a dealbreaker for most Blackberry users.

* Gmail may give you 7 gigs, but Outlook/Exchange gives you as much as you have hard drive space for, and hard drives are awfully cheap these days. The fact that some corporations have crappy policies isn't Outlook's fault.

* GMail is free, but most people get Outlook with Office, which they were gonna buy anyway. Exchange server isn't free, but it's only a few grand. And, notably, it means you control and store all your own email, this makes GMail a dealbreaker for people for various security or legal reasons.

But yeah, the Outlook spam filtering sucks. There are plugins to make it better, but I still think GMail has the best anti-spam I've ever seen.
Brown is one of the more famous universities that offers something of the sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_University
Sorry if that came across the wrong way. I intended to say that fanboyism over a version control system seems foolish. I've used a couple version control systems, although currently Plan 9 does all the version control I need with its archival fileserver (works for my kernel modifications).

I would never suggest undertaking a major coding project without some form of version control. However, it's a tool used to improve your work; going nuts over git (which seems to be the fashionable thing these days) is like an artist raving over how great his paintbrushes are and making special little boxes for them, or a carpenter who won't stop talking about his hammer when he's supposed to be roofing your house.
I use passook. Its a perl command line generator for pronouncable passwords of selectable strength. Quick and dirty.
They should've used italic: http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=148
Many top business schools today have grade non-disclosure policies that stop employers from asking about grades and stop students from sharing their transcripts. The students love the policies because they claim it increases collaboration and teamwork, but my own experience suggests that the students also love not working hard. The undergrads at a place like Wharton (who have grade disclosure) often look for classes with loads of MBA students (who don't) because the MBA students pull the curve down.

When people are going to school to learn, I don't think removing grades will hurt performance, but learning can suffer when people go to school for credentials and a job. Career-oriented students seem to listen and learn more when there's a meaningful grade waiting for them at the end of the semester.
NASA offering free zero-g flight time for viable emerging space technologies.
My medical school, like most top medical schools, did away with grades in the first two years. Every student does take the same class from the same professor. The professors can still calculate an ordinal rank order of the students because they have all the test grades. And it's mostly trivial anyway because the residency programs aren't nearly as interested in your grades as they are in your standardized test scores.

The only thing that happened when we did away with grades was that the students lost the only quantitative feedback they had. We even had professors in the beginning refusing to give us our test scores.
I wrote this a while back in response to that question.

http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/05/teach-yourself-you-t...
I think it basically boils down to:

Hacker News logins are a privilege, not a right.

Coming from a background of things like talkers where you needed to be explicitly invited by another user before you could get in, I don't really have a problem with that.
Incidentally, having the page detailing the post-formatting capabilities on the Reply page would be handy, so people are aware of italics,

code indentation

and so on.
> scores are necessary to give an impression of a person's ability

That's what standardized tests, like bar exams and medical licensing exams, are for.
Re: folders & hierarchy, using a combination of labels named parent, parent/child1, parent/child2, etc. works pefectly for me. If you're on firefox the Better Gmail extension will actually turn these into expandable folders. Its not the perfect solution - but it works more than well enough for me.
My Fortune-100 employer just did almost the same thing-- buried the Reply All in a submenu under 'Reply'. It hasn't stopped the stupidity of people emailing their lunch orders to the entire division. Now I know that the EVP of site development likes turkey and cheese, no mustard.
Problem: measurements are noisy, biased, and sometimes vague.

Solution: stop measuring stuff?

Height is a good measurement because it is standardized and objective: I stand on my heels, fully erect, adjacent to a ruler. The marking parallel with the top of my head is my height.

What we should be doing is trying to bring grading to a similar level of objectivity and standardization, not throwing it away completely.
Holy crap, how have I not heard of this?!

I love 1Password, but I wish they supported Opera. I would almost switch to this if it weren't for the need to reset hundreds of passwords.
I have noticed a piling on of downmods in the past couple of weeks. TooMuchNick seems to have lost 30+ points for a couple of comments. They didn't add much to the conversation but they weren't so offensive that he deserved that. He got the point. Probably -1 would have accomplished it. HN is the most civil site that I have seen. All it takes is a gentle tap to remind a commenter the s/he didn't contribute to the discussion.
Seconded with gusto.

I've got the one password that I used on all my low-priority stuff--Slashdot, throwaway mail services, etc. It's a terrible password, but at 9 letters it at least has some length and it actually may last against a dictionary attack.

Gmail, my university mail account, and other next-tier things get a stronger password, but still easy to type.

The rather more strict requirements of my school's CS and CE computer systems mean that I have to have complex passwords which change frequently. As such, I have a few that are based on phrases with numbers interspersed (the canonical example, I believe, is "Don't have a cow, man" which becomes something like "d0n'tHac,m" which has the added bonus of looking like "don't hack 'em"). When the policy requires me to change, I can either swap in one of my other extra-strong passwords or, if it remembers previous passwords and I'm stuck, I can just add a number at the end.

My job uses a CryptoCard for most things, but I use a randomly-generated Kerberos password for mail. When it changes, I write it down and stick it in my wallet until I have it memorized, then destroy the paper.

TL;DR: Assign different services to "tiers" and use a different password for each tier, with increasing complexity of passwords corresponding to increasing importance of services.
Thanks! I like the USB drive idea (maybe on a keychain) in conjunction with keepass (I'll need to look more closely at keepass - I skimmed over it a while ago). Also I like the supergenpass suggestion below - less to carry, and as long as I have the bookmarklet on a browser, and my master password, easily accessible. More to think about! :)
I know! Where's the news on this been? This sounds awesome - more research, but I'm seriously thinking about switching.
I don't think we'd ever get to see the data, but this outage created a beautifully structured natural experiment. It's almost impossible for companies to learn how well they would do if a market leader disappeared, but 30 minutes without Google probably told Microsoft, Yahoo, and even a place like Cuil what their best-case future looks like.
Woody Norris: Inventing the next amazing thing (TED talk; 15 min.)
Yea, Sedgewick. His books taught me algorithms. they are to the point, readable, and have working code.
What about putting a cap on the number of users that can register per day? This keeps the community growing but in a controlled fashion.
Quicksort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort The wikipedia article has a great visualization of the algorithm in action.