skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note: the term snake oil in regards to cryptography has different connotations than it does in general use, implying naïveté/overconfidence rather than malice.
From the article above:
"Most products seem to fall into the middle category: well-meaning but insecure. I've talked about the reason in previous CRYPTO-GRAM essays, but I'll summarize: anyone can create a cryptography product that he himself cannot break. This means that a well-meaning person comes up with a new idea, or at least an idea that he has never heard of, cannot break it, and believes that he just discovered the magic elixir to cure all security problems. And even if there's no magic elixir, the difficulty of creating secure products combined with the ease of making mistakes makes bad cryptography the rule.

The term we use for bad cryptography products is "snake oil," which was the turn-of-the-century American term for quack medicine. It brings to mind traveling medicine shows, and hawkers selling their special magic elixir that would cure any ailment you could imagine."
Can Bug Hunters Keep the Internet Safe Infographic
Why brew instead of port? I've always wondered why the pendulum swings between ports and homebrew so often on HN ..
I agree that
var a = new Array(1,2,3,4,5);
is an old construct and should be replaced by
var a = [1,2,3,4,5];

but the form

var a = new Array(10);

can be very effective when you need an array with n elements and you are not in a position to .push() new ones in - you just need those elements to be there.

No confusion here - just lots of helpful language features.
This is a pet peeve of mine, and I wonder how many HNers share this feeling. Why doesn't Amazon provide hard spending limits? Back in 2006 [1] this feature was supposed to be "in the works", but clearly it's not.

Just as with the low security of many domain registrars, I guess there are not as many horror stories as my paranoid mind would lead me to believe. Any thoughts?

PS: Yes, I understand the dangers of enabling these limits, which ideally should be accompanied by previous alerts, etc.

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=10532
> we still haven’t seen our “Java of the browser”

Haven't we?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet
Anyone know if there is a Lua driver for RethinkDB in the works? I suppose I could use the C client and think about generating one for Lua, but maybe someone has already done that?
Somebody hasn't seen "wat". https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
The Biggest Problem in Computer Security
Facebook the most stress-inducing social media site (also, the most positive)
The sad part is that it's not satire, it's cold hard reality.
Look at clang. In this case they already had, and continue to use, LLVM, so their only job is to turn C++11 into a bytecode, in any way possible.

It has still taken a number of the best C++ programmers and compiler designers years to accomplish, and they haven't finished yet.
Any time people hate on Perl but like Javascript, I get confused. Perl has some weaknesses vs Javascript (doesn't run in the browser, can't be parsed by anything other than perl so you don't get interesting new interpreters) but also some considerable strengths (uninsane OO, considerably better tooling, string handling, runs on every server by default).

But the nice things about JS - the effortless ability to go all higher-order, the flexibility, the power, the /fun/ - and much of the bad parts - the difficulty with writing clear and maintainable code, no support for strong types; if you like Javascript, you will love Perl when you get to know it.
Facebook is desperate to call itself a mobile company
Use hardware-based Crypto Keys.

Use Crypto Keys for your email.

Use Crypto Keys for your garage door opener.

Use Crypto Keys for your encrypted hard drive.

Use Crypto Keys for your payments.

Use Crypto Keys.
I'm happy with Remember The Milk (and pay the US$25/year to get it to sync properly with my iphone; my girlfriend is happy using the web version on her ipad), but I haven't tried anything else to compare it to.
Fair enough. Aesthetic reasons aren't the worst ones in the world.

It's also just so... Yeesh. Complicated, in comparison.
I've seen worse. There's a UK company called The Train Line ( http://www.thetrainline.com/ ) that handles money, and limits passwords to 10 chars with no punctuation characters.
It's always good to keep things in perspective. Many of my friends in the liberal arts are doing PhDs with the same (or less) 7% tenure track position rate. The difference is that they don't have the choice to go into industry afterward. Our "worst case scenario" of going to work for Google for $150k-$200k is a dream for most PhD candidates.
Whether or not there are some measurable benefits to the company for telecommuting does not matter.

I don't think that it's always this clear cut.

In other words, the managers, speaking for the company say they want more "productivity". What they really need is more control and reduction of risk. They feel a certain level of assurance when they can see people walking into the office on time, every day. It assures themselves of their own continued employment. Give the manager what he needs (the assurance), and this conflict goes away.

This isn't always true - or necessarily often true. Most managers I've deal with over the years are much more focussed on productivity than control. Some maybe think that control is the best route to productivity - but that's a different problem to solve.

For a start - everybody here who's building a startup. As soon as you get employee #1 - congratulations. You're a manager. Are you suddenly unconcerned about productivity ;-)

As somebody who is considering non-founder hires in the next year I'm thinking about ways that I can have them be local and co-located. Despite the fact that this may involve getting an office for the first time, possibly moving locations, hiring newbies and training up rather than hiring for skills, etc. Because, in my experience, the productivity gains could well be worth it. I'm going to experiment at the very least.
Worthless satire without concrete examples. Don't say "and failed to follow its Terms and Services", show actual terms that are likely to have been broken.

I regularly bypass NYTimes paywalls by opening an incognito window. Is that against T&S? Is that a federal crime? The T&S and federal law being broken must be explicitly stated for this comic to have any useful impact.
> Still, you don’t see that many big Python and Ruby shops either...

But we keep seeing a lot of PHP shops. Does this mean that PHP is better suited for "large scale projects?" I'd very much doubt that.

The ease of learning a language and it's availability are very important factors in the popularity of a language. Javascript scores well in this regard. Really, I am not too worried about Javascript's impending doom. Unlike Perl, it continues to remain a favorite "target language" making it further entrenched in most ecosystems.
None of those statements imply that it is unique to the New Guinea culture though.
And, Perl has an awesome community, let's not forget that. They do love clean code and all (modern Perl is very easy to read and understand IMHO), but are aware that in the end you want to get the job done.

Time and again, the question "are there any useful ideas or features in language X that we can borrow and implement in Perl?" has been posed by prominent people in the Perl community. Which is the opposite of the "not invented here" syndrome.
I spend a lot of time writing technical documentation, in Org-Mode, LaTeX, and so on. In order to collaborate efficiently with others, we need to have a strict line wrap policy (one line = one sentence), so that diffs are easier to understand (e.g. under emacs, auto-fill breaks paragraphs formatting). Since Draft is designed for writing, how does it handle diffs?
I'm very impressed by this.

To address some concerns:

- Even if this is a PR stunt, it's a very good one, because regardless of the outcome, it convinces many people to sign up.

- Many people are claiming that he's not going to pay. Given the fact that this is a PR stunt, it would be twice the failure, and backfire severely if he did not.

Honestly, I signed up an account just to poke around, and looking at their offerings, it's quite something.

50GB of space for free! A nice simple and clean interface. The IP addresses of your last connections displayed prominently.

Maybe I wouldn't trust it with sensitive documents, but as simple cloud storage, I don't see anyone else offering 50GB of storage for free.
How would this be a man in the middle attack? You should be able to record it yes but as you said keystrokes & mouse movements are used to SUPPLEMENT entropy, as in they also use other entropy.
If your password is 100,000,000 characters long, that's simply a waste of bandwidth, CPU time, space on the disk * millions of users * 1000s of iterations = money flushed down the toilet. And remember web servers have timeout parameters spread across half a dozen config files. You're just asking for trouble. Not worth it. To protect one self-important nitwit's video game password? Even your million character password could be sniffed or worse, the attacker might offer a hot apple pie with ice cream.
Bought something online across state lines?

Did you pay the state and local taxes?

If no, YOU are a tax evader.
Are we still spreading that canard where type errors are somehow some kind of bugbear in Python?

It's not a profound part of writing code in Python for anybody that's spent more than a few weeks with it.
Remember the guys who found that AT&T was publicly showing iPad user email addresses (in the clear, without any authentication) on its website? One of them wrote a script to visit a series of URLs on that site, incrementing a number at the end of the url each time, and collecting those email addresses. Then he used the emails to publicize AT&T's info leak.

The script just visited publicly visible web pages and collected some information from them. The guy who wrote the script was convicted under the CFAA (the same law used to prosecute Aaron Swartz) of conspiracy to access AT&T’s computers without authorization.

So, what's authorization? If visiting a publicly accessible web page can constitute unauthorized access, then your hypothetical is indeed the case, e.g.:

http://cfaadefensefund.com/
I still don't understand why you think they should make it easier or faster for people like you (or me), when they have their pick of immigrants and many, many more applicants apply each year than there are places. At that point they can well afford to make all their checks very thorough.

I don't even live there any more so it doesn't affect me directly.

How Oz treats refugees is a subject of much debate, I was trying to say it's quite a separate issue from this one.
And non-Dutch Caucasians, for that matter.
How Often You Should Hire Cleaning Services?
That's not gonna happen at an office. Programming requires intense concentration, hard to get in a room full of people

I'm willing to believe that, for some people, this is true. That they cannot work outside of environments like this.

There are also people who believe that they cannot work well outside of environments like this - but are incorrect (I used to be one of these).

There are also people and organisations who are very successful great developers who love and promote team room environments.

a) I'm not sure of the relative numbers of those groups

b) If the team room environments are a lot more productive then developers of the first sort are going to have long term problems getting work on projects that involve teams of developers
Preface: I've been an avid cyclist since 1986 and worked as a mechanic at shops for over ten years.

The article seems to have been written by an outsider that has absolutely no idea how bike shops work. Bicycles themselves are loss leaders -- they make very little profit there. Their money is made from upsell, service, and repeat customers. The margins stated in that article do not reflect my experience. Not by a long shot.

Of the many shops I worked at, very few things made them truly successful:

1) Love, Time, and Knowledge: Easy peasy. know your shit. The best shop I worked at was owned and run by a guy that started the store at the age of eight. Yes, EIGHT. He sold chains and tubes out of his parent's wallpaper store. I live 3000 miles away and still recommend that shop.

2) Location: The worst shop I worked at was on the richest street in a popular tourist destination. It didn't matter how bad the service was or that there was another better shop a mile away. Foot traffic was the only thing that kept (and keeps) them in business.

3) Niche: This only works if your expertise is in a specific type of cycling. The biggest source of failure is that (a) you didn't know as much as you thought or (b) there was another specialty shop that's too close.

4) Outside interest: Someone (usually a company) gives you boatloads of money no matter how bad you do. One shop I was employed at was a BRAND landmark. That shop lost money every month for decades, but it didn't matter; they still sold more BRANDs than any other brand in that city combined. It was a brand recognition issue that was probably considered a marketing cost.

In the end, there's a common industry joke I heard many times:
Q: How do you make a million dollars?
A: Take two million dollars and start a bike shop.