skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got to say, as somebody who is very comfortable with the command line (my job is linux server admin) but has never used arch before, that sounds pretty damn obtuse.
Hello taigeair,

I started out in internet marketing (5 years ago just after high school and throughout college) then i moved into product development. I brought 2 iPad styluses to market before my profits dried up due to stiff competition from china.. by far the most exciting business i have been involved with so far.

Internet marketing is a very cut-throught world to be in and to service you almost certainly have to make sure there is a market for what you want to sell otherwise you'll go broke and enter debt really quickly.

It is this experience i am drawing upon to offer this service
I am approaching my final semester as a CS undergraduate and, to be totally honest, I am more than a little nervous about my decision to go down the PhD route. I've got a decent application, so I am less worried about getting into a program and more worried about life in it. I appreciate the experiences others have shared here, and I'd like to relate some of my thoughts and concerns because am curious to know if (how) I'm being naive. So, while my post here is mostly aimed at veterans who might dispel any illusions I hold, I would value any input.

I've applied to CS PhD programs and intend to do research in AI/Machine Learning. I am fascinated with the field, and though I have only a little undergrad experience with it, I've loved it all so far.

One of my main goals in getting a PhD is to improve my future career prospects, whether in academia or industry. I am ambivalent about going into academia for a post-doc career, as I think a startup or even industry would make better fits for me personally. I've noticed most industry jobs I'm interested in require graduate education, and I expect the PhD will likely over-qualify me for most startups. But more than all that, I want to make use of my mind (I know, I know: its that tired cliche about changing the world...) Though I enjoy coding, and I excel in my classwork and projects, I'm not a programming genius (which, perhaps regrettably, is what some people seem to expect from a top CS undergrad). I have had a taste of what it is like being a professional software developer, which is what my friends are prepping to do straight out of college, and I know it is not for me.

One qualm I have is that, as an undergraduate, I've had only one internship relevant to AI/ML and only a taste of research (no publications, some lab work), so the whole funding->research->publish sequence is still a little unclear to me (although reading blogs like Philip Guo's helped demystify the whole graduate experience). Another worry is that I do not want to put my life on hold. I can tolerate living on little funds, but I can't accept being a slave to my research: I want to have relationships and interests outside of the lab. To this end, I plan to keep my act together, work smart and effectively, and finish my PhD on time.

Does this seem like an unreasonable plan? Will I be facing jobless doldrums by having a PhD? What more can I do to be prepared for graduate school? Is there anything major I'm overlooking?

Also, thanks to HN in general for contributing - this has been a great thread.

EDIT: I neglected to mention I'm in the US.
Oh no no no! I thought the same about Jobs back in 1985 but everything that we've learned about him since points up how irreplaceable he was. Without Jobs, Wozniak would have been a brilliant, happy, but obscure engineer at HP, Ive talents would have been mostly wasted, and Jef Raskin would still have, maybe, gotten a shot to build the Swyft and the Archy which even in our universe are obscure. Without Jobs you would never have heard of any of them. Instead you would be claiming that Steve Jobs rode on the success of <unknown brilliant people whom Steve worked with>.

EDIT: I should be clear that I thoroughly admire Steve Wozniak (one of my first heroes), Jony Ive, and Jef Raskin.
Philippine Startups: Replicating Silicon Valley in Asia 
It is an exciting time to be in the Philippines– our economy is doing well and the world is recognizing we’re an emerging market that should be noticed.
Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit
Are you implying that they overlook other js contexts like onload tag attributes and such?

I get what you're driving at, but can't infer what you're conspicuously not explaining in full.
So Mega uses SSL ( RSA 2048) to deliver code that checks if additional resources delivered by SSL (RSA 1024) are identical to the original ones. However they have a flaw in the authentication that checks these resources such that their security can now be broken by breaking the weaker SSL connection. But given the problems with certificates, there are scenarios were breaking SSL, irrespective of the encription used, is not a problem ( if you can install CAs at the target.)

I am actually somewhat surprised that the known problems of Mega are so few. I would have expected that their crypto is more broken than this.
I bought a cheap TF300 and was blown away to find the same slowness. If you're doing any downloading it's basically unusable. Especially disappointing as the rest of the hardware (including keyboard dock) are great.
No, as far as I can recall.
Read downthread; we are saying the same thing.
Have you tried using Rails engine for this or different components of your app?

It is actually pretty neat because the same login session can still be used within multiple engines. You can also release them as gems too.

I used to work on an enterprise app which we created the whole chat system with Rails engine. Then, we release the engine as a gem so that it can be used on the main app. I think it works quite well for us so far.

more info: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6118905/rails-3-1-engine-...
Atari files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Please point to a company that the business press believes is not having this struggle?

I can find humorously contradicting articles about mobile growth at every single interesting tech company.

Let's take:

http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-may-not-be-struggling-wit... (june, facebook not struggling with mobile ads)

vs

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-23/facebook-s-slowing-... (october, oh shit, facebook's got a mobile ad struggle again. I guess it's a relapse?)

In fact, here's an article about how everyone seems to be having this trouble:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/technology/in-mobile-world... (facebook, google, intel, microsoft, yahoo, all sucking it up at mobile apparently).

Sorry, i'd go on, but i just can't even read these articles. I had to stop at:

“What has caught people off guard has been acceleration of
the multitude of things that you can do with a smartphone,”
said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor
who studies the technology sector.

Yes, Google was completely off guard by the acceleration of things you could do with smartphones, especially after starting a project to accelerate what you could do with smartphones in late 2005.

Look, this is what the business press does. They have deadlines, they pick the trend of the day/week/year, and write about its relationship to some company, without putting any real thought in the matter.

None of this is any different than the "The market was down this morning in reaction to XX YY" bullshit articles you read.
Prior to 4.x, the "highly optimized JVM" you speak of was fully interpreted.

Slight correction: JIT compiler was first introduced in Android 2.2
Kim Dotcom and those in the Mega posse know the encryption they are claiming is mega secure is in fact a mega lie. We all know it, but does it actually matter? The whole point of the encryption wasn't so you can upload files without fear of them being looked at by staff, it's to prevent Mega from being taken down by the US government again by claiming they truly can't see the file contents of their server.

The encryption, it is a lie but at the end of the day it shouldn't detract from the fact that Mega is a decent cloud hosting platform with decent ideas. Compare Mega to offerings from Mediafire, Dropbox and insert other cloud file storage provider here and Mega is quite compelling considering the free 50gb of space you get.
Not for long, with inflation being in the double digits in many parts of China. Soon, China is going to be a lot like the US only with 10x as many old people.
NYC Tech Talent Draft
Seelio has an exclusive partnership with NYC EDC to drive student tech talent to startups in NYC.
> All too commonly, psychedelics are used as "party drugs" rather than used constructively in a deliberate therapeutic, spiritual, religious, or shamanic context. This can lead to all sorts of problems.

Bullshit. Some of my most profound life-altering psychedelic experiences have happened while losing my shit on a dance floor.

Don't be a pompous ass.
Glimpses of Long Distance Relationship Through Yahoo Answers
Great talk, It's a great simplistic explanation about design innovation
From what I understand the risk is not so much that somebody breaks the 1024 bit SSL. It is that the Javascript code (presumably including security critical stuff) is loaded from a third party CDN network.

So by nature a CDN network is going to comprise many servers in different locations. Therefor if somebody pwns one of those servers it is risky for anybody who downloads the JS code from that particular CDN server.
In the context of the Mozilla Marketplace, 'IAP' stands for 'In-App Payment'.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment#In-app_payment
Github is back in China
Zeus IDE - Version 3.97o Released
Your question about the economics wasn't silly... I was just pointing out that corporations like McDonalds are very unlikely to start spending money on robotics research or rethinking their entire business. It just isn't in their corporate DNA. Whether the economics make sense or not... McDonalds/BurgerKing/TacoBell etc. isn't the one to figure it out.
Zeus is a language neutral programmer's editor/IDE for the Windows platform.

This latest version adds improvements for the ASP.Net, C#, Go and Perl languages.

NOTE: Zeus is shareware, runs natively on the Windows platform and runs on Linux using Wine.

Jussi Jumppanen

Author: Zeus IDE
Google AdSense REDUX: IN Through the OUT Door, A YES from a NO
Why almost?
answers depend on the accuracy in users profiles.
Btw, you can try this simple search in your social circle: http://servletsuite.com/fbdir
Temperature-wise, it does.

I'd still rather eat a brick. Carl's Jr. continues to insist on using very un-marbled top sirloin and then they cook it to death, with it ending up extremely dry usually. At one point I think they must have experimented with using Gelatin to hold more of the moisture in the meat. It tasted like meat Jell-O.

Ugh...
Leaving aside the issues of whether they've made mistakes in their crypto, I think the more interesting point brought up by tptacek is that you can't truly trust any client-side application that gets downloaded from the server every time you go to the site. As much as Mega wants to protect your privacy, there is always the possibility that some entity forces them to trivially break your encryption by adding some javascript that uploads your private key and steals your password.

Is it possible or desirable to secure a web app from its own creators? The web is by far the largest and most successful software distribution mechanism of all time (depending on how you define 'software') and it's built around the idea that the creator can update the app at any time in a completely agile fashion. But for certain classes of software, maybe it makes sense to protect the users from the authors, or the authors from their future actions.

You might be able to accomplish something like this in a really hacked-up fashion with HTML5 application manifests. Perhaps you could have the application manifest include itself, to prevent the page from ever trying to load itself again, and then have all updates happen though an AJAX mechanism that validated each download and allowed third parties to verify that it was safe.

But rereading the idea, it sounds neither pleasant to use nor particularly safe. Is this "packaged software" mechanism something that should be built into the browser at some level, or are we just doomed to running this class of applications as native apps?
Airbnb: Infrastructure for Holiday Cards
Show HN: an html5 + bootstrap template app for appengine
On the contrary. The more stable and integrated your life and psyche are, the greater the chances of having a good experience.

Psychedelics often bring a lot of subconscious, repressed content to consciousness, and it is mentally stable, healthy, and integrated individuals who are in the best position to deal with that content.

I would strongly caution unstable individuals, or people who are experiencing or being treated for mental illness to stay far away from psychedelics (unless you're using them under the supervision of an experienced therapist -- and even then, that's very controversial).
You are projecting a lot into my argument, I find it distracting. I neither hate Microsoft nor idealize open source. Nor do I, and I suppose it's tautological to say so, suffer a "blindspot" created by rage or group think.

I value reasoned arguments that can start from first principles and end up as rebuttal.

In the spirit of reasoned debate, allow me to try to summarize your arguments here:

1) Dell's server revenue is purely a function of their vertical integration (single source).

2) Red Hat isn't relevant because their revenues are small relative to Dell.

I am not persuaded by the argument that Dell's only competitive advantage is that they integrate a number of systems. If that were the only reason than HP, SuperMicro, or even Sun/Oracle should be able to capture market share away from them.

I'm not persuaded by #2 because I don't believe revenue is anyway at all to measure Red Hat's impact. I see their impact in the number of seats out in the wild and that is formidable. They are a supported OS on nearly every platform and Oracle has gone so far as to create a clone of their distro to "compete" with them. Oracle has more revenue than Red Hat.

And for the record, I too owned an Amiga, but I didn't feel particularly persecuted.
At a McDonald's store in my country that I worked in, the labor costs were only around 15% of the store's costs, whereas the cost of food (excluding wastage) is around 25%. Since the minimum wage in my country is about twice as high as that in the US, I wouldn't be surprised the relative labor costs are even lower there. McDonald's also happen to pay 20% above minimum wage over here.

Burger assembly is only a small part of the labor cost. You have the cashier, the fries person, drinks, management, salad/deli assembly, cleaning (during opening hours as well as final cleanup afterwards), as well as carrying stock from the truck back to the store.

Whether those machines would be profitable would depend on whether it is worth saving 5% of the cost of a burger in exchange for the capital and maintenance cost of the machine.

McDonald's isn't a burger company. It is a real estate company.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a-real-es...
Unless you're Facebook / Google / Microsoft you're better off with a a bunch of full stack programmers than a bunch of specialists

Sometimes when I read job listings for "backend dev" or "frontend dev" I start to thi I am the only full stack guy out there. Thanks for helping me feel less alone.
we don't need incentives, we need less complexity.

I'm running a business 'cause I know a lot about and am interested in SysAdmining. I don't run a business because I enjoy spending all day trying to figure tax loopholes and how they effect my business.

Not only that, aside from student loans, screwing my taxes is the only way I can get myself into debt that I can't get out of through bankruptcy. Adding complexity to the tax code makes it much more likely I'm going to screw it up. It vastly increases the amount of risk I have to take to start up a small business.

When you are ultra-small, while you are working part time? you often pay more (in terms of your own time, or in terms of money paid to bookkeepers/accountants) in managing your accounts than you pay in taxes.

I guarantee you spend more money on bookkeepers/accountants than the piddly $500 a year or what have you for limited liability (which doesn't by the way, limit your liability for the thing that is probably most likely to bite you, screwing up your taxes.)
I think the worries are kind of ridiculous. It seems like people are just recently adapting to a real use of mobile. Once google figures out how people are using mobile, it shouldn't be long for them to adapt and monetize. Until people stop using the internet altogether, I'm not too worried about Google's ability to turn a profit.
We designed a continuous liquid-bath cooking machine that can turn out fries, etc. in a relatively small space. Does pasta too! It was a fun experiment.

The biggest problem was having demand that continues unabated; a machine like you're describing is used in industrial food production I believe.
Ah. Well, yes, you wouldn't want a call stack overflow.

I am starting to realize why people who know functional languages despise Java. I first started programming in Java, but now the more FP I learn, the uglier Java gets.
I mean more in a theoretical sense.

For example I use code that does crypto everyday, probably everyone on the internet does.

Web frameworks , operating systems , browsers etc all use crypto and presumably that stuff is written by some mythical person who can do this stuff properly judging by the fact that my credit card hasn't been frauded yet..
The technology exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Znch-RfhRI
I've had the same experience on a Nexus 7, and when I turn on the developer system monitoring it always either pushes memory into swap or maxes out some cpu cores and doesn't properly utilize all 4. The biggest culprit I would say is that you have 4 cores but your computationally expensive javascript is never multithreaded.

Though I do acknowledge the internal memory is slow as crap.
I think I just heard tptacek flip his table over from here
Somewhat OT - in Redwood City, it's not unusual to see lines of 3-5 people at each of the two Red Boxes at the seven-eleven on fifth avenue. I'm guessing those two redboxes do more business than the entire Block Buster in downtown RWC based on how fast that line turns over.

Block Buster got squeezed out by automation - At the high end from iTunes and on the Low-End from Netflix/Redbox/Amazon.
Our closest star is 4.3 light years away. If we could fly 3 times faster than our current space probes, we'd get there in 430 years. Not good for a small crew, but maybe a generation ship.

And this is excluding the tremendous gains in propulsion technology we're bound to have in the next 100 years. Maybe not even faster-than-light technology, but even flying at 0.4c would give us great reach among the stars.
Not all of my posts are about them. I'd say most of them probably aren't these days. This one certainly wasn't. This one was inspired by a story which made it onto reddit or HN (can't remember which) about how North Dakota now looks bright at night from space due to petrochemical flares. That got me to learn about flaring, and the whole distillation tower concept and so forth. Before I learned about that, I had no idea crude oil could be turned into so many different things. That in turn got me thinking about "using all of the buffalo" - everyone's probably good somewhere...

Meanwhile, HN has these YC company job postings which can be completely ridiculous, and it's impossible to discuss them to call them out on their insanity.

If I write a post about something and it makes you think about a certain company, that may say more about your impression of that company than anything else. See also: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/03/03/corp/
Please point to a company that is not having this struggle?

Does that matter? If the article is about Google, and Google is having problems, then it makes sense to report on it.
In the future, underdog McDonalds asks for subsidies to keep human labor competitive
As someone else mentioned, MD5 has been known to be broken since 1996, but I'll assume you meant something like SHA-256 or SHA3-256.

I haven't looked closely at the code, but the author of the article speculates that the code was implemented by people who are unfamiliar with cryptography. I think that's a pretty reasonable explanation. Cryptography looks deceptively simple, but it's actually a complex and specialized field that takes years to get good at. Even experts in the field routinely build cryptosystems that are later discovered to be flawed. After all, they're building roadblocks that are designed to prevent everyone---even well-funded experts from the future---from finding a clever way around. Oh, and while they're at it, they have to consider CPU and RAM constraints, too.

Many developers don't treat crypto with the respect that it demands, and, unfortunately for end-users, this is the result.
Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout
You realize graph search only utilizes information that YOU make available.

Why did you make that data available? Do you not want others to see it? If you didn't, then why did you put it out there for others to see?

Also, you know that privacy controls are taken into account right? So if you don't make certain data available to certain people, you don't show up in searches for those people....

I think you're being a bit irrational when you say that you're "being used".
The problem though is that it is not harmless. Psychedelics blast your brain chemistry and can have extremely unpredictable consequences, especially with continued use. The effects can spread to not just your life but to the lives of those you care about.

Personally, I think everyone should experience psychedelics when they're ready but to think that they are harmless is dangerous.

The effects of drugs are like having an addiction: you won't know at all what it's like until you try it and once you do, there's no going back, for better or for worse
Considering the 50GB you get is the reason why I won't touch them.
Thanks friend, good to hear from you again.

I hope Mike Crawford gets out of jail, he did some 911 phone calls and bragged about it on K5 and then crashed Hacker Dojo and other startup events. Here is a musical mix of his 911 tape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7RglDs2DkA It has the Crawford Cats in it as well.

Crawford sees himself as a hacktivist and has been suicidal in the past. Here are some of the things that got him in trouble:

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/04/startup...

http://startupweekend.org/2012/04/30/not-even-bmob-threats-c...

https://twitter.com/dhawalc/status/209088242094571520/photo/...

http://www.reddit.com/r/michaeldavidcrawford/comments/ur825/...
I was under the impression that even a 128 bit keyspace is prohibitively hard to crack using modern hardware, and that 256 bit would take more computational resources than we can reasonably expect to have available to us for the rest of time. Isn't 1024 bit a bit overkill?
> critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas

And I wonder how critically important it was, also, that the mixing pot be attended in person, with spoken words the only ingredients allowed?

If it's done by email, no-one forgets which idea was the CEO's.