skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just got the email:

Dear Fogger,

It is with a heavy heart that I let you know that the PHP Fog service will be discontinued in December in favor of AppFog, which is PHP Fog 2.0. I am incredibly sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Creating PHP Fog has been an amazing experience for us and it could not have happened without you––thank you for your support. With your help, we’ve built an amazing PaaS for PHP developers. And along the way, we’ve applied what we’ve learned to creating our new product, AppFog.

AppFog is the future of our business, and we very strongly believe it is also the future of PaaS. So, in order to focus our team and efforts on continuing to build a better solution for developers, we will be shutting down the PHP Fog platform this coming January and focusing solely on AppFog.

We have considered this change very, very carefully because we understand that this could present challenges for some of our users. But in the end, we are confident that moving to AppFog will give you additional flexibility, additional languages, additional infrastructures, and the ability to deploy your apps to private cloud infrastructure as well as leverage the strengths of the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry ecosystems.

To help in the migration, we will do be doing everything we can to help this be as easy and painless as possible:
2GB of RAM in our Free Plan
We will be releasing a series of blog posts that walk you through the migration to AppFog.
We will also be publishing documentation of the migration path as well as solutions for some of the edge-case differences between the platforms.
To start with, we have created a migration FAQ that should help you begin the migration process.

I am committed to making AppFog a product that will make you look back at PHP Fog and think, “I’m really happy I switched.”
I wasn't that lucky.
But I've grabbed some screenshots:
http://imgur.com/a/SikfG

I especially like the "Expected 3 components in jwt:" one :)
Not necessarily. You can roll over an existing 401k into your startup without taxes and penalty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollovers_as_Business_Start-Ups

This is how many people buy those Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's franchises.

As for it being a good idea ... do you really think your 401k in mutual funds is going to give you a comfortable retirement? After your hard earned 401k savings are pillaged & plundered by the likes of GS and their HF algo's, Ben Bernanke & friends have printed so much money that your retirement fund will barely buy a new car when you retire and Congress has frittered your Social Security away on endless war ... this doesn't seem like such a bad idea!
In the UK, anything within a stone's throw of an insult can be considered libel so long as the target decides to pursue it in court.
This is really interesting, and a beautiful little project.

Unfortunately, I don't think it will be of any use to actual poets... Rhyming isn't really in style for modern poetry, and what there is is usually more subtle internal rhymes rather than heavy end-rhymes.

Still, this is a ton of fun to write doggrel with.

(source: my wife has an MFA in poetry)
A walled garden may do a perfect job of keeping rabbits from eating crops. Yet despite completely fulfilling its purpose, it still can't prevent vegetables from rotting.
I agree that a large percentage of companies say they want to hire from the top 5%. However, from what I've seen, their HR departments seem hell bent on eliminating anyone exceptional.

They want a bargain (ask them if they also expect to pay in the top 5 percentile), a college degree and experience with exactly the technology they have now.
Same here.

PHP Fog had its share of problems, but AppFog doesn't support Git.
No, it does not turn out that for the vast majority of cases, broken crypto is good enough.

It turns out that for the vast majority of cases, broken crypto schemes don't have enough users for the tiny minority of software security people who look at crypto to bother beating up.

Once one of those systems becomes popular, crypto pentesters finally get around to poking at them, and, lo and behold, thousands of users are discovered to have been communicating effectively in the clear for years.

It's one of the more pernicious evil memes in our field that "if you're not the NSA, everything you do is broken, so just try the best you can". No. The attacks we're talking about take 50-200 lines of Ruby code and less than 30 seconds to run. There's no excuse for being exposed to them. We mercilessly mock people who screw up SQL queries, but then act like it took a network of intelligence service supercomputers to break our amateurish cryptosystems. We'd all be better off if fewer people tried their hand at building these systems in the first place. Use PGP, or Keyczar, or NACL. If you're typing the letters "A-E-S" into your code, you're doing it wrong.
I'm a SoftLayer employee, so my perspective on this might help ... A server at SoftLayer is often more expensive than the same server at another provider, but those identical server specs don't necessarily make it an "apples to apples" comparison. When you don't need any of the free value-add functionality that differentiates a SoftLayer server (which I won't include here for fear of being "salesy"), the numbers probably won't add up. SoftLayer isn't positioned in the market to compete on price, and you're right that there are a lot of quality hosters who offer reliable, powerful servers for lower costs.
How many copies of Windows 8 have sold?
Failure is not rewarded at Microsoft (as far as I know!)
Windows head Steven Sinofsky to leave Microsoft
Supporting innovative HS computer science projects
Indeed. Most companies don't have the operational experience to optimize for speed until they are later stage. Also, they will develop on something like Heroku and get addicted to the ease of use.
I wouldn't touch cryptography code in production with a long stick. Thing is the headline all crypto code you've written is broken is sensationalist and doesn't apply to 90% of developers, who "write crypto code" using third-party libraries.
It would be useful to have summaries of actual articles instead of funny jabs at HN memes
I think educating people about some pitfalls and then recommending them a "full package" solution will stick better.

For example, for ECB it's trivial to explain, that it allows reordering of encrypted blocks, an attack that someone not familiar with cryptography has probably never thought about. Of course they won't gain a full understanding of cryptography in this way, but they will hopefully start to appreciate how difficult it is to get right, and how many attacks there are that they have never thought about. This hopefully includes an understanding that possibly other modes that they think would be safe might also have problems that they have never considered, and that they should really use a full package solution.

I think this will drive the point home better than, say, listing three opaque possibilities on how to use a MAC and then saying "no 1 is the right one", without any explanation whatsoever.
The backend has php scripts that either return json objects or simple responses

I am a PHP developer and I ran into this question recently. At the startup where I work, we have a web app that is completely Ajax driven. When we decided to convert those Ajax endpoints to an API to be used with a mobile app and possibly open it to the public, I did some research and eventually decided on node.js and Restify. One of the draws is that with an Ajax webapp, we already have a team of JS devs on staff, so there would be less of a learning curve. I'd suggest looking into it.

EDIT: I forgot to address the multithreading part. I believe that node.js is not true multithreading...it is event driven, so it can use a single thread more efficiently, which should achieve the same effect.
Why do brands keep pushing traffic to the Facebook/Twitter pages instead of their own pages? They should create dynamic interesting content on their main pages and use social media to push traffic towards it instead of using social media as a goal.

Ownership of your following is really important and at the end of the day the only way to do that is to have a proper standalone website.
Shopify turns into an iPad marketplace today by launching "Catalog"
Oddly enough, this post has the same air of self-importance most people on the show exhibit.
That was completely content-free. It made me want to watch the Bravo reality show.
thanks. i can actually make sense of the list using this page.
I wonder how Oxford feels about all this...
If people tend to disproportionately forget small price changes and remember large price changes when taking surveys, it could skew the results this way.

Both the distribution of observed price changes, and the probability of forgetting/remembering, could be different between men and women.

For example, suppose women buy equal amounts of two different goods X and Y.

On even-numbered years, manufacturers raise the price of X by 6% and keep price steady on Y. On odd-numbered years, manufacturers raise price on Y by 6% and keep price steady on X.

Actual inflation is 3% but women see a price jump of 6% per year in one of the products they buy. If they only notice/remember changes in prices and ignore/forget prices staying the same, then they'll report inflation as 6%.

Men buy equal amounts of X, Y and Z, where Z increases by 2% per year. Thus, men report an average price increase of (2% + 6%)/2 = 4% per year, again ignoring the non-inflating good.

All these numbers and effects are totally made-up speculation, but the idea seems sound and reasonable.
Why not just switch your payment provider? You should be able to do a simple paypal IPN integration in less than a day.

* Paypal IPN
* Stripe
* 2Checkout
* Dwolla

and a host of others.
> There is no chance in hell Facebook will allow every "Liked" product, service and company to spam the users' newsfeed as much as they want

Except that's exactly what they've done for years now. The real problem is that Facebook didn't limit this from the beginning, because now companies are going to complain. I removed all my "likes" several years ago for that reason.

Facebook likes to push out extreme changes and then walk them back to what people actually want. This is the opposite of the right way to do it.
Ok, as of 12:09pm CST, I was able to add a 16GB N4 to my cart and check-out.

So either they found another pallette of the things somewhere, or people are getting cold feet and canceling their orders.

Hitting F5 on the product page seems to find a phone about once every twenty times, and on about the 1/5th try to add to cart, it succeeded.
I am utterly baffled by people expecting a show on television to be even close to reflecting reality.
I have an unlocked Galaxy Nexus and I don't see any system updates in settings. Do you have any sources for this?
this is just for demo purposes, if you install the extension you will have the summaries of the actual articles on the frontpage of HN
I tend to view things like this the same way. Yes, all that advice is good. But all the effects that the listed minutiae deal with are way, way down the priority list of any real-world application. Specifically they're well below the threshold where a compromise of the user's computer via other means and/or a compromise of the human communication processes involved is a bigger threat.

The MAC example is a good one. You're at the point where you're trying to protect your app against a chosen ciphertext attack (pretty far up the sophistication scale), and trying to decide the MAC mode. The text in the article makes you sound like a total idiot for not knowing what the "right" choice is and making you worry that you might not get it right.

And then you get hacked because one of your admins had a ssh key on her phone and it got stolen.

Too much security analysis is missing Big Picture issues...
The Canadian carriers don't seem very interested in doing favorable deals for bring-your-own-phone customers.

Either it's still too small a segment or (perhaps more likely) they've figured out they can lock people in to more 3 year contracts if there's no difference in the month-to-month prices.

I've seen Bell occasionally do promos where you can take $5/$10 off any plan if you have your own phone, but not much besides that.

I'd be very happy to be told I was wrong and there was a way to get better pricing, BTW. :)
Wow. I've watched the show with my wife and had been assuming that no one should take a deal they weren't really happy with. Better to walk out with no deal because even then you've gotten free advice from some shrewd, experienced people. But free ain't free, it seems.
This is a tough one, and it really depends on what YOU want.
What exactly did you like/hate about your iphone? That will help people respond to your question.

I'll tell you what I tell everyone looking for a new phone. Go play with them. Honestly, that is the best way to find the phone that you want considering most of the specs are similar unless you are a power user (ie, flashing new roms, rooting etc). Put the phone in your pocket, sit down, walk around with it etc and make sure it fits your daily life. This is specfically true for the Note 2 which is f'in huge. For me, it's size wasn't a huge deal and I returned my s3 for a note 2 last night. The note 2 is f'in awesome, but it may not be useful to you.

In response:
S3: awesome phone, nice features, a few apps you can't delete (I had the AT&T version, YMMV) but overall a very nice feel. I really liked that phone and although it was large (4.7" screen), it was light and easy to use.

Note 2: LARGE. 5.5" screen..which is too big for most people. It also has a stylus (pen) that you can use to write on it and I really like that feature. however, if you have no use for that feature, don't bother.

Nexus 4: I haven't used this yet so I can't say much. what I can say is that it looks pretty bad ass and I'd highly consider it IF it had LTE connectivity.
I live in NYC so LTE is all over the place and the difference between that and 3g is pretty significant. This, however, only matters if you have access to LTE networks.

Overall, I think you can't go wrong with any of the choices you are going to make.
If you live in the states, and you are on contract, the S3 is going on sale at BestBuy for $50 on Black friday (2 yr contract required). If money is an issue, I'd almost think that is a no brainer.

To be short, just go play with the phone and see which one you like best. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has their own interests in mind, so the only way to really make the right decision is to just interact with the phone yourself. You aren't going to pick the wrong phone, all 3 of the phones you are interested in are pretty damn awesome:)

Oh and lastly, Youtube! Go search on youtube for the 3 phones and watch reviews.
Right. To paraphrase: it turns out that for the vast majority of cases the "security holes" in the system aren't due to broken crypto. So what's the practical difference?
Thanks for the response.

I used to agree with you on the price until I realized that with Heroku you're essentially paying for a dedicated server with that much RAM for each plan. Reason being, every single database is "hot" and the entire thing lives in memory to avoid I/O.

On second glance ... you're right. It is kind of pricey.

Speaking of moving to dedicated.. I'd love to hear some of your general feedback on how AWS has been at some point. Essentially where you'd use it again or where you'd go directly to dedicated (or a diet option like a VPS) if you were starting on a new project.
Forget about "any-number-hour week" - each one has his own work regime and in startups especially you work not for counting hours, I guess.
Besides, rock tends to be harmonically quite conservative, compared to classical music and jazz.

The reason something like the intro to Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze" stands out is that tritones are very much the exception rather the rule in rock.
I love this sentence: "Normal people, who have normal jobs working for other people, can no longer relate to you, and you can’t relate to them."
I wish I knew how to better deal with situations where I have to interact with people working normal jobs, it's very awkward.
lifeisstillgood -- I really appreciate this. hard to get great feedback, and your list shows that you really clicked through the site. spending your time for someone is a fantastic compliment.
I have the regular assortment of (multiple) generations of NAS devices at home and in the office as well. But, when you want to go throw that Windows 7 image onto VMware and use it for a few days, or you want to do some editting of your family vacation photos, or you happen to be on a business trip to brazil, it's _really_ nice to be able to just pop a USB/SSD into your laptop and edit/view a way. I sync back to my external drive/NAS when I get back into the office/home.

For those of us who travel for extended periods of time, USB/SSD Flash Drives are a nice alternative to external Hard Drives and/or spending a fortune on Internal Drives w/Apple
Interesting. I'll assume that your math is correct, since I'm admittedly too lazy to actually run the numbers and check it. My question is this: in the question of whether or not we should have the electoral college (or more broadly, in the question of what kind of system we should use for a national election), is voting power an ideal measure? Your OP suggested that it was not. Do you have an alternate suggestion?
JavaScript Speech Recognition API
I thought their primary model was charging businesses to handle the money handling aspect of renting desks out. Being able to cowork somewhere for free just because I'm also offering space seems like something that wouldn't be used very often. (Or am I misunderstanding?)
Posing for naked pictures of yourself not thinking about what the consequences of those pictures will be in the future makes you an idiot, full stop.

In the battle of idiots vs morons, only the lawyers win.
Scholarpedia gets a redesign
Yeah but how do I use systems with crypto? What if I want to encrypt some text? Do I worry about a MAC? Does GPG do MACs? How do I know? Do I worry about EAX? GCM? CCM? AES-CTR? CMAC? OMAC1? AEAD? NIST? CBC? CFB? CTR? ECB?

Programmers have to use crypto libraries all the time. The 3rd sentence in this post is "Chances are whenever you have tried to use a cryptographic library you made some sort of catastrophic mistake." Crypto is hard, but humans have to use it--this post is ridiculously complex and utterly unhelpful for anyone who's not already an expert, and that's not uncommon in crypto documentation, I think.

That's not how it should be. Something so important and widespread should be written about and explained in a human manner. My point is we need some resource to de-obfusticate the technobabble for those of us who need security but have day jobs that aren't developing the latest and greatest hash algorithm.
Go to your profile, find the list of things you like.

https://www.facebook.com/[user ID or name]/favorites

Tell me, do you want to receive updates on all of 0.5k things you liked? Because if each of them writes even one post a week, you can forget about ever reading things from your family and friends. And the latter is what Facebook was designed for.
15 awesome, unique and geeky backpack designs
That's not the biggest problem with ECB, which is a case in point for why simplified discussions of "the right way to do things" aren't going to work.
That's the price the eBay sharks are selling at. It's not the official price.
As the creator of hnsummaries.com and former founder of a news summaries business, seems like a nice middle-ground would be to give the user an automated summary and then let them edit it if they choose to do so. As we moved towards this model, we were able to be much more efficient (we were doing it internally though).

You have a chicken-egg problem with real contributors (my guess is that you're bootstrapping the content with editors?). Am excited to see where this goes!
I've got a Nexus S 4G, I'm lucky if I see an update within months of release.
IE10: Fast, Fluid, Perfect for Touch, and Available Now for Windows 7
Dropping a new nginx binary and live-migrating to it takes as much time as doing the same on Apahce with a new .so

Have you ever actually used nginx? I compile it from source with much-less-than-everything for security reasons (e.g., no proxy, no email, no ssi, no ssl, not any of the other ten modules that come by default), and in the 3 times that I needed a module later, it was a quick ./configure;make;make install;kill -SIG2 (or whatever the signal is to switch to a new version), which was not more painful than I remember from my apache days of 5 years ago.

(Has apache changed since then?)
Can Apache or other httpd's do the same live upgrading trick that Nginx has? Seems like a really wild feature.
3 Lessons We Can Learn From Big Brands In Social Media — socialmouths
Short answer - it lets you verify the data before decrypting so you can reject invalid data earlier.
No! In the majority of cases where people use crypto, they do in fact have trivially exploitable crypto vulnerabilities.
Just to clarify, all free tier services are being shut down in late December and paid (dedicated) services in late January.
The Nexus phones typically haven't been all that popular, so it wouldn't surprise me if supply was low. That would have been more because of expected low demand than marketing. Perhaps they were aiming to sell out on low demand, and got more than they bargained for.
According to the article, one of the reasons they changed the company name is because it was hard for people to understand the old name when spoken verbally.

Their new name seems to have the same problem.

For example:

Learndot: "Email me at paul-at-learn-dot-dot-com"

Customer: "learn dot com?"

Learndor "No, learn dot dot com"

Customer "???"
StackMob Ratchets Up The Competition: Launches A Marketplace
Firestorm Erupts Over Virginia's Education Goals
> I would humbly suggest you rethink what the term "power user" means.

You are confusing "power user" with "data hoarder".
Most mega corps never recover from fuckups of this sort. Microsoft thus far has kept pulling them out of the hat.

MS is not agile in the same sense as your YC funded startup is. That would be comparing speedboats to super tankers and in the world of super tankers Microsoft is one of the super tankerest of them all.

Nokia, RIM, Boeing, HP, Yahoo and many others couldn't pull a single "pivot" out of the hat all the while Microsoft keeps on dancing.

They are far from my favorite companies, however Microsoft and IBM prove year by year that elephants can and do dance. And what a gracious waltz that is. For an elephant of course.
I honestly thought it would be arguing to go up to 40 hours.
This sucks.

But actually, I'm glad to hear it. Over the past 2 weeks (since we upgraded matchist to a PHP Fog dedicated server), their support team has basically dropped off the face of the earth.

Their support live chat disappeared. Their phone number goes to voicemail. And there's no way to get a hold of them other than their ticketing system (which they respond to every few days if you're lucky).

I loved PHP Fog when I first heard of it and started using it 6 months ago. But honestly, I'm not sure we're going to switch to AppFog since it's the same team. Not sure I want that level (lack) of service.
I don't like that I have to create an account to try it out. I realize you answered in the comments that the summaries in your demo are not real, but because of that it makes me want to try it out before I give you my email since I don't actually know how it WILL work. You should just make it installable without an account, then after it's installed encourage users to create an account for future updates (probably why you would want signups?) or more features maybe.