skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for igniting this discussion, Niten. While digging around, I stumbled onto this tool which others might find helpful:

https://github.com/lowe/zxcvbn

zxcvbn, named after a crappy password, is a JavaScript password strength estimation library. Use it to implement a custom strength bar on a signup form near you!

zxcvbn attempts to give sound password advice through pattern matching and conservative entropy calculations. It finds 10k common passwords, common American names and surnames, common English words, and common patterns like dates, repeats (aaa), sequences (abcd), and QWERTY patterns.

Sample results (including Tr0ub4dour&3 and correcthorsebatterystaple) and a demo can be found here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/209/zxcvbn/test/index.html
I would suggest most people would disagree with your primary definition which seems to have been taken from Urban Dictionary; your argument is rather specious.
This reminds me of the quote, "All press is good press," but I can't
recall who said it. You're right it's a waste of engineering time,
but the shitstorm also has benefits.
Conversation from three days ago at http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/169405/google-indexi... suggests that the best hypothesis is that at some point in the past, www.doioig.gov was compromised and maybe redirected to StackOverflow.

(This hypothesis is supported by a Google cache of doioig.gov showing the message "Due to security concerns, our website will be unavailable until transition to the Department of the Interior web domain occurs. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and are working to speed up the transition. The following contact information is provided to assist you.")
This entire thing against Heroku is so disingenuous... The fact that New Relic didn't expose these metrics is not great, but has very little to do with Rap Genius team not knowing about the metric.

Apparently, the fact that requests can be queued at Dyno level was common public knowledge back in 2011! Here's a quote from Stackoverflow answer:

"Your best indication if you need more dynos (aka processes on Cedar) is your heroku logs. Make sure you upgrade to expanded logging (it's free) so that you can tail your log.

You are looking for the heroku.router entries and the value you are most interested is the queue value - if this is constantly more than 0 then it's a good sign you need to add more dynos. Essentially this means than there are more requests coming in than your process can handle so they are being queued. If they are queued too long without returning any data they will be timed out."

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8428998/276328

When you use a PaaS, it doesn't mean you don't need to be serious about it and completely forget about all technical aspects. Granted, it should have been included with New Relic from day one, but hardly justifies such a direct and persistent attack on Heroku.
Thanks for the feedback. I am definitely going to do those things immediately. Appreciate it.
Kardashev 2 or bust.
Accounting for some tax breaks you could have gotten the lowest-end model for ~$50k, which, I think, is close enough. The price on their website starts at $52,400 (taking the tax break into account).

The Model S Performance starts at $87,400. However, this is a very special top-of-the-line car, comparable to an AMG or M model from Mercedes or BMW respectively. This is definitely not the average car or the average price.

Of course, just like its German rivals, the price does go up with some options. But if you just want a nice electric car, the options are, well, optional. (Although I wouldn't pass up the tech package if I could afford it :P.)

And it's not like the standard equipment is weak--the well-publicized gigantic touchscreen comes standard, for example.

Anyhow, basically you can get one for a bit over $50k; the price only goes up if you want a longer range and some nice options.
But it would take willful blindness to suggest that rape is not overwhelmingly often a thing that men do to women.

Actually there is an open question whether the USA currently experiences more rapes man-on-man inside of prison or rapes man-on-woman outside of prison. One place to start looking into this topic is http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/....

However given the choice, there is no question that men who are inclined to rape overwhelmingly would prefer to rape women. And outside of a prison setting, women are overwhelmingly the targets.

(All of this is not counting child sexual abuse, which is its own chamber of horrors.)
I agree with this point, however, how Rap Genius spends its money isn't an issue here. Whatever the reason, they paid and expected to get an adequate service from the company, which they didn't. And on top of this, they found the shady practice at work. And this is a big fucking issue, if you ask me.
Wind is far too variable. Even if you have a very well sited wind-farm it could potentially be weeks or months when the effective power output is zero. This is ruinously impractical as a base load power system, whereas solar is far, far more predictable (even with weather variation). The big problem that solar has is storage, which hasn't been worked out yet and probably raises the cost by anywhere from a factor of 2 up to an order of magnitude.
These are all fair points and I've upvoted you.

Apparently it's common to pay trimmers in 'scissor hash', ie what THC laden goop one can scrape from cutting shears, bud to smoke and food. Perhaps this employee was only paid with a burrito but I think it may be more likely she was compensated in both food and drugs. This is not to say the employers was acting fairly though.
Agreed. Also, as a long-time NetBSD user, I'd be much more interested in having a package manager that's as easy and flexible as Homebrew on NetBSD rather than running pkgsrc on my Mac.
In the post, they say:

"The investigation has shown, however, that the individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords. Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption. (In technical terms, they are hashed and salted.)

While our password encryption measures are robust, we are taking additional steps to ensure that your personal data remains secure. This means that, in an abundance of caution, we are requiring all users to reset their Evernote account passwords. Please create a new password by signing into your account on evernote.com."

What it doesn't say is how the passwords were dumped in the first place, or what they're going to do to ensure it doesn't happen again (outside of taking "additional steps"). I understand that not all users of Evernote are technical, but I'd like some peace of mind that a similar thing is less likely to happen in the future.
Very interesting investigation.

I heard somewhere that the Apple lightning cable, that comes with newer iPod, iPhone, iPads contains a chip and we'll be very hard to replicate (by Chinese cloners). Any insight on this?
"Step 1: Create a case-sensitive filesystem". wtf?
Wow this works really well! Love it.

By the way, this really demonstrates why I don't have much confidence in speech based applications. I started playing this in my living room, and my sister immediately was like "why are you doing that?" It's weird to just start talking at a computer. Felt weird, looked weird, was weird. That's why walkie-talkie functionality, which was in a lot of phones for a while, lost out to text messaging.

(not a criticism of this game, which I like a lot)
I think it's odd that from my comment, which was solely dedicated to correcting your misinterpretation of his comment rather than expressing my own endorsement of it, you have extrapolated that we "disagree".
This is not really true.
Exceptions: while driving
>Price Classes let you reduce your delivery prices by excluding Amazon CloudFront’s more expensive edge locations from your Amazon CloudFront distribution.

Sounds to me like it's completely trivial to restrict streaming to the cheap servers and everyone else will just have to cross more of the internet to get there. I seriously doubt that this is a notable part of their reasoning.
I'm not a fan of anything, I just use things.
Adolescentes de Nueva Zelanda en alto riesgo por uso de teléfono
Original HN title: "950 million of 1 billion of Groupon's funding wasn't used to fund the company"

This also stood out to me as an interesting claim from the article. Does anyone have a perspective on how that can happen without raising some sort of legal issue?
Citation? I'm a data point of one, but...I did it..
Tactics for Thriving in a Startup Relationship
A Tesla Model S and solar power is a great combo. Congrats!

How do you like your Model S so far? Does it meet your expectations?
Isn't that what the banks and small business loans are for? VCs are a playing different game.
DRM Chair – Chair that self-destructs after 8 uses
Hello,

This is Sandy Malviya from Silicon Valley. I would like to discuss with you about this opportunity. I am sharing an email with you.

Thanks & Regards!
Sandy Malviya
Configure Jenkins to Include Commit Logs With TestFlight Builds
Wind is really an indirect result of solar energy as well -- solar energy creating different pressures in the atmosphere, which produce wind.

You are incorrect in stating that most things use the sun for energy. In fact, everything uses solar energy in one way or another.
I like this because it's interesting to think about what we can build today with existing technologies that future civilizations will look back at in the same way we have done here! It's inspiring, all the potential around us that we cannot see.
Awesome presentation. Brendan Gregg shows a scary amount of expertise here.
Very motivating to start using more advanced tools.
I thought SSL was enabled on Evernote for all customers now? Maybe its time to consider not using Evernote.
Third'ed. After a careful study of the available cross-browser svg libraries a year and a half ago, I selected Raphael for a series of WebApps. Some associates chose others. Over time, they now all use Raphael. One of those decisions where I look back and think "got it right the first time!"
For what it's worth the "socialist competition" was widely regarded as a fake and ultimately laughable construct by pretty much everyone in the country. Sure, there were enthusiastic supporters, but they were few and far between and they weren't actually looked up to by the unwashed gray masses. They were regarded more like people who were really, really proud of their boyscout badges.

(edit) Reading other comments - I should clarify that what I said relates to the 1970+ period, not the earlier years.
Depends on the platform. I've come to despise mobile UX monkeys if they can't write Cocoa.
Period.

On iOS it's different, the developer knows the best.
Would love to hear the things that have worked for you.
Besides Musk's viewpoint, I'd argue some simple math. There is vastly more potential power being emanated from the sun every second than there is in the prevailing winds on Earth's surface. The atmosphere being in differing states of high and low pressure is caused by multiple factors, but heating from the sun is one of them. In the long term, almost all of our power is derived from the sun (with exceptions like geothermal, even hydro is dependent on the water cycle being driven by solar heating) anyway - might as well go directly to the source.

I just easily see the entire planet being powered by some terrestrial satellite grid of solar panels in a few centuries. Capture it in space, transport it to surface via a space elevator or something, maximum efficiency. Would probably also slow global warming since significantly less heat by that point would be reaching the surface (given the size of an artificial ring belt of solar panels we would need to run everything by then!)
I recommend Stack Overflow
I see some very good points were already made, but I think UUIDs are also good for at least three other reasons:

1. Offline / sync - you can have out-of-sync or offline clients (e.g mobile apps) inserting new data without worrying about pk mismatch or collisions.

2. security - it's obviously a bit of security through obscurity, but not being able to guess the key of an object can be very useful some time. It shouldn't be relied on as a first line of defence, but it gives you a naturally impossible-to-guess reference. If you want to avoid someone crawling through your image-base or any object that is generally accessible, but you want to avoid having it accessible in-bulk, UUID is your friend.

3. Silly mistakes - If you pass an object id, you really want to know it can only be for one object. Maybe the front-end is sending an id of one object, but the backend is working on another (shit happens). When you use sequential ids, you increase the chance of weird stuff going on. With UUIDs you simply can't use the wrong id, even by mistake.
I see the Roman numerals as actually more like binary than our decimal system. Then again their system has a lack of uniformity
A former Soviet citizen here.

> Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming.

Oh yes. The US and Europe credited the Soviet Union well, and the Soviet Union paid in gold.

At the same time, Soviet authorities robbed its own people, partly by putting hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps, partly by just taking away their possessions. The great hunger of 1935, with massive human casualties, has happened because grain was expropriated from peasants to be sold for gold, and the gold was spent to build massive steel factories and weaponry plants, using American and German expertise.

With regard to shooting people dead, USSR was not shy of action at all. Massive death sentences in 1935-1939 witch hunt campaign plus cruel oppression of several riots against expropriations and hunger account for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

(If you can't look this up in Wikipedia yourself, I'll gladly help you.)

Trust me, this is not a model of growth you'd enjoy.

Regarding gamification — yes, that was one of brighter ideas. Too bad that real competition was often replaced by a fake that made bosses happy, using massive falsification of results.

You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'?
Can you share some info about the solar panel system? I assume it must be about 60m^2 of panels?

Are you paying for it outright or on a plan where you pay based on electricity generated?
This was pretty well documented when it happened in 2011. You can do anything you want in a private company if the shareholders agree. In this case, Groupon's existing shareholders agreed to roll around in big piles of money so that new investors could get in at any price.
From the article, it sounds like they were well aware of the logs & queue values, but they were misleading:

Their logs are STILL incorrect. Here’s a sample line:

2013-03-02T15:41:24+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path=/Asap-rocky-pretty-flacko-lyrics host=rapgenius.comfwd="157.55.33.98" dyno=web.234 queue=0 wait=0ms connect=3ms service=366ms status=200 bytes=25582

Those queue and wait parameters will always read 0, even if the actual value is 20000ms. And this has been the case for years.
I have shared few details with you. Please have a review.

Thanks!
A Linha Ferroviária Suspensa de Wuppertal
netteller (I think was the name?), an online banking system used by many smaller banks, including the bank I used to bank at in Tennessee, used to require passwords be exactly 6 alphanumeric characters. This didn't change until just a year or two ago. Scary.
Poly + mono-terror: look to India
See also: http://thetoasterproject.org
.) At our workplace, we use preallocation for almost everything. When we do dynamic allocations, typically it is from free-lists from pools that we pre-allocate.

Almost all of our allocation/freeing costs are cheap O(1). Pretty much everything is zero-copy. That is why I cringe a little when I hear that GC's are "faster than manual MM". Because manual MM done well can eliminate almost all of the costs of memory management.

I also cringe a little when I see "malloc" deep inside C functions.

I really like the basic convention in C that you should pass needed allocations in as arguments (and it is virtually always possible) allowing these allocations to be members of of members of other allocations, aggregating allocations so there are much fewer.

.) Information regarding heap-allocs is relatively easy to obtain with "oprofile", look up the time spent in "malloc" and "free" and the related functions underneath them.

.) C makes it very easy to use an array of the values you want, rather than an indirection. For Lists, I don't think that is a useful idea. For hash tables, given that many entries are empty, I think it is a better trade-off to have your hash array as an indirection, though the buckets could be explicitly put together. And so on.

I often encountered dynamic allocation overheads are noticeable or even huge chunks of my runtime when I had to work with code that used them. Reducing the dynamic allocation really helps. We're not safe, we need to work towards it explicitly.
Sobering stats on business failures
There's a talk by Randall Munroe (xkcd) at google where this is debunked by Knuth himself. It also features him being asked questions about Python by Guido.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24
On my Mac, I currently install software in at least 8 different ways: pkgsrc, homebrew, GNU stow (for software that is in neither of the first two), gem, pip, drag-and-drop to /Applications, running installers, and using the App Store. It is becoming a bit hard to keep track and keeping things updated, but I've found it really is necessary to use all of these. Frequently a package from pkgsrc will not build, so I'll revert to homebrew. If it's not in homebrew, I have to build it manually or find a binary distribution somewhere.

On my Arch Linux system, in constrast, everything is installed using the Package Manager or pip.
Bacteria that live on nutrients emitted from deep sea hydrothermal vents do not use solar energy. Some theorize this is where life on Earth originated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent#Biological_co...
Pretty cool tool! My passphrases (omitting spaces between words) get a score of 2. But if I drop the vowels, the score goes to 4 and crack time to 'centuries'.

I wonder if this is a good way to create passphrases. Anybody want to chime in?
Not sarcastic. The story has some key elements:

1. Right place at the right time (found abandoned baby in subway).

2. Unexpected (wasn't 'in the market' for a baby or considering purchasing/obtaining one in the near future)

3. It's who you know (in person, the judge offered the option to adopt)

4. Narrow window of time for decision making (had to commit to a yes or no at moment of offer or it would become less likely)

5. Total commitment, against all odds (sceptical partner, unreliable system, health of infant unknown, same-sex parenting unorthodox and not universally supported, etc.)

6. Happy ending (stories of wasted opportunities are a dime a dozen and impossible to substantiate, "What if...?")

I would think any startup could easily relate to these aspects of the story. That's why I think it works so well as a parable.
The valuations for startups are generally pretty defensible. Any serious valuation number is based on somebody actually buying shares at that price, generally a professional investor with a lot of experience. The price of a thing is what the thing will bring.

Whether or not they're realistic is hard to say because they are bets on wildly unpredictable situations. Not long after Amazon IPOed, I considered shorting the stock because I thought it was wildly overvalued. Now it's worth circa 100x what it was worth then.

Qualified investors are just people with enough money that they are presumed to know what they're doing. The reason non-qualified investors generally can't buy in early is precisely because the SEC is protecting them from getting taken for a ride. The whole "going public" thing is mainly about disclosing enough that you're following the investor protection rules.

I agree that Groupon is a hot mess, but I don't expect that any rules were broken, and I don't know what new rule could have prevented it without doing more harm than good. Do you have something in mind?

My guess is that the people who bought Groupon stock made one of two classic mistakes. One is buying shares because they like the product. The other is buying because it's hot. I've seen professional investors make those mistakes too, and learn some valuable lessons thereby. It's sad that a lot of people had to learn those lessons with Groupon. But the SEC isn't there to protect people from ignorance or bad trading strategies. They're just there to stop fraud and cheating.
this could be interesting, especially if from the trenches, supported by real-life scars (experiences)
If you are capturing energy in space, and channeling it to the ground somehow, how have you reduced net energy reaching the surface of the earth?
Casual sexism is not a joke.
Harlem Shake embedded in YouTube's website
Interesting points.

My (limited) understanding is that Sputnik was launched by a rocket designed in Nazi Germany and copied with minimal modifications.

I'd say the outsourcing craze we see in the recent years is very similar to the transfer of factories and technologies to USSR and Germany in the period 1929-1939.
FlightCar finds savvy way to save on airport parking