skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's implied. I'm trying to think of a group of unwashed above average income people. Burning Man attendees are the only group that comes to mind. Maybe you live in a country where rich people don't wash up. Edit: then there's the filthy rich.
Even with the current restrictions people still use it quite extensively as a "I disagree" button.
I find this particularly disturbing:

> I made an offer to continue to host posterous.com and all the stuff on it but never received an answer.

Has Twitter completely lost touch with the web community? Is it possibly to get a response from them these days if you're not an advertiser?
Yes, and in my mind, it's a bit unfortunate to have it all centralized to a few major portals.

Especially since nothing lasts forever, like we clearly see here. When a giant falls..
More like I wasted a lot of time spelling out something that was already obvious. This is a bug in forums, not a feature, and one that has bitten me many times. You can't be concise on forums, because if you leave any possible room for misinterpretation, someone will reply with it.
Same for me. Since it's not available in my country, I'm on plug.dj, but it's definitely a part of my daily work ritual and I would really miss it if it weren't there anymore. It's a fantastic resource to discover new tracks in a particular genre.
I’m not sure who originally told us about the Sunday test and the Caller ID test, but if they remind me I would certainly like to thank them. These two very simple ideas have kept us from making some very bad hires, and have convinced us to make others that were great. The Sunday test is as follows: if the candidate is in at the office alone on a Sunday afternoon, would you be more likely to come in and work with them? That answer has to be yes. We want to be excited by our colleagues, and not feel like we’re holding them up or they’re dragging us down. The Caller ID test is equally important, and is as follows: if the candidate calls you on a Friday night and wants to spend time hanging out or working, are you more likely to pick up or let it ring to voicemail? If you wouldn't pick up the phone, that candidate is the wrong hire.

Argh. These rules are toxic. You are unlikely to predict your best hires. A lot of evidence suggests that engineers are uniformly bad at making subjective judgements about future performance. The "Sunday" and "Caller ID" rules basically put a deceptive veneer on the most subjective of all criteria: the "gut check".

That's bad enough, but both rules also have a pernicious culture effect. In companies full of 20-something Red Bull drinking 11a-9p gamer nerds, the rule gets you more gamer nerds. In companies full of 30-somethings with kids, you get more people with kids. This is exactly what you don't want to have happen; a real culture adapts to any positive competent person you find. Good cultures figure out down the road how to get people to hang out outside of work. They also accept people who just don't want to spend their out-of-work time with their officemates. Why would you want to filter those people out? That property has no known correlation to ability or performance.

Finally: do you really want to be the hiring manager who says out loud that you have a rule built into your hiring process that involves people working on Sunday? Don't make people work on Sunday.

The sooner we kill the "Sunday rule", the better.
Re: Trolls - on a meta/tangential note it does seem like "troll management" (aka moderation) could alternatively be called governance - it's essentially what keeps libertarian ideas in the fantasy realm - anything involving large numbers of people undoubtedly requires extensive rules in order to keep things stable (whether they're explicit rules as in managed systems, or implicit rules where avoidance of external authorities is what keeps people in line - ie, torrent culture).
Man, the earth would suck with 300 million people. We'd lose 80% of our culture and technology. Imagine a world where the only settled country was the USA.
Ok, let's break it down a bit.

What is it?

A t-shirt.

Why?

To help charity through Watsi.

Why that design?

Because this is a shirt about hacker news and not ycombinator itself. Even though they are hosted in the same place, they are two different things and brands.

Also, notice that the only common design clue in hacker news is the orange top bar with the gray background. Hacker news lacks a logo. The nex best thing to use would be the only other thing that visually differences it: the ugly design.

Why not the ycombinator logo?

Because the shirt is about hacker news. Not ycombinator itself.
Quite a bit for a company that choses to fund itself by soliciting investment.
Cache Invalidation—Is there a General Solution?
Apparently the compat issues with record splitting have been resolved sufficiently well that all the major browsers have turned it on.

Yeah, there's Lucky 13 but you said above that this RC4 vulnerability is unacceptable in a way that Lucky 13 isn't. Basically I'm wondering what the point is in fervently recommending RC4 over AES-CBC when they both suck.
101 ways to save Apple (1997)
> and for anything more complicated you have to undertand how it works in order to use it, which is the greatest sin a piece of software can commit imho

Actually, I think you are perfectly wrong about that "sin". You just hit upon the exact reason why Git is good.

Git's point is that the data model is the tool. There is no abstraction (or at least very few), because it would only serve to camouflage what is important about it. It's just a data model and tools to manipulate it.

The way to explain Git is to start with the database: blobs, commits, references, and so on. The neat thing is that the way Git implements version control -- that is, linear version control (there are exceptions, like Darcs) -- is how version control must necessarily work.

In other words, if you understand Git, you understand how version control, and vice versa.

Of course you can have a VCS that is a completely black box. But even a black box needs a sort of public data model that the user understands ("files", "versions", "branches"), and I think Git's transparent, open-engine-approach is better than any other approach so far. For one, it makes it really extensible.

(I used to be a Darcs user, which requires that you become a quantum phycisist to understand its data model. I loved Darcs, but it meant that it broke, and it often did, it was almost impossible to fix the problem by hand.)

Now, I absolutely admit that Git's UI is terrible. It's geared towards hard-core developers who work on things like the Linux kernel. There little middle ground between the easy and the hard, and the learning curve is steep. But this is the fault of the command-line tools, and my thesis applies regardless of the UI.

Git has gotten better over the years. Just the fact that a newly created branch now has a default origin branch (so you don't have to set up the two .gitconfig keys you would need manually) is an amazing usability improvement that should have existed from the start.
Pat - A Sinatra style library for Go
Netty and the JVM meet OpenSSL to speed up connections
Go-rest A small and evil REST framework for Go
What scares you more: AES-CBC with best-effort fixes for Lucky 13, or RC4?
Namespaces in JavaScript
Thanks! The trend is not exactly conspicuous.
Actually I'd say (and I think Joel, the inventor, said the same thing) that it's a meta tool which is much more versatile than a bug tracker. It's like Excel - people are starting to use it in ways nobody has ever imagined it. I admit that I never imagined it to be used as a household management tool. Of course, one can do Kanban on it, too. Oh that reminds me I have to check out their API, I'm quite sure it's going to morph into some kind of authoritative meta list store.
Ask HN: Can anyone suggest PHP based alternatives to AppFog?
Hi HN,

I have a PHP web app that runs on AppFog. We used to be on PHPFog and were really happy with the service/platform but have had nothing but problems since they forced us onto AppFog. I am looking for alternatives.

Our database (RDS - mySQL) and back end (EC2) obviously runs on AWS and we want to stay within the AWS cloud for our front end. I want to give money to a PaaS provider that can manage our front end servers for us so I don't need to spend hours learning and configuring AWS Elastic BeanStalk.

Suggestions for a solution?
This is not directly replying to you, but something you said made me think:

> so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed

What about things that aren't really owned or consumed? Clean air/water, forests. Do they factor into this function somehow? If not, I have difficulty trusting any suggestions based on that definition of "wealth".

And just in general, I'd much rather optimise for happiness than wealth. But it's much harder to quantify, so I guess that's why people don't.
The other catch with that approach is that requests can be simultaneous, fail, and/or arrive out-of-order, so the server would need to accept any authentication cookie that it had recently sent to the client, not just the last one.

Not impossible, but not easy.
> but it's gathered a lot of cruft over the years

In what way? The Common Lisp standard hasn't changed since 1994.

> essential features like multithreading are not standardized

No one has made up their minds what the best atomic test-and-set operations are. A lot of platforms can't even agree on semaphores vs. condition variables. Which concurrency primitives do you think should be standardized, and which should be left to libraries? To me that seems like a trick question, because there's no good answer.

For example, I think software transactional memory is a dead-end, and shouldn't be part of a language standard, but many people involved in Clojure obviously disagree.

> More importantly, it doesn't have a focus on immutability and functional programming by default.

You can always do FP in Common Lisp, but you can't do gotos in Clojure.
I've worked in two completely different companies where we tried some notion of using the product without signing up. Both times we just got more people with less overall engagement at the cost of complicating the backend infrastructure.

Not to say this will never work, but it's definitely not a panacea.
I like the question. Until and unless the person who chose it wishes to answer, here's my attempt at a more-than-complete answer.

I guess orange may be chosen as a rather eye-catching color. A reddish orange may be chosen to be a bit more tasteful or distinctive.

The choice of RGB component values may originate in an older practice in web design called web-safe colors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors). It uses the observation that 33 hexadecimal (let's write 0x33) evenly divides the range of an HTML red-green-blue color component: 0x00, 0x33, 0x66, 0x99, 0xCC, 0xFF. Choosing each of the three color components from among these six values yielded 6^3 = 216 colors, a palette that would fit into a low-end graphics adapter's table of 256 colors with room left over for system-defined colors.

Those who have studied Mersenne primes may recall that it is sufficient to observe that 8 is a composite number in order to prove that 0xFF = 0x100 - 1 = 2^8 - 1 is a composite number. And we compute that 2^8 - 1 = 255 which ends in 5, so it's obviously divisible by 5, the quotient being 51 = 0x33.
Well it's definitely better than the original. I still think there could be a better design.

Calling all designers!
EDIT: Grey Shirt. Orange bar across the entire top (rectangle, even on shoulders) and a white Y on one of the shoulders.
I just found Redactor [1] that works fine on Android 4.0, so I redact my comment.

[1] http://imperavi.com/redactor/
Why was Go chosen over NodeJS ?
Except perhaps the most important thing - the idea?

Possibly worth looking too at what I was originally doing - refuting the idea that Android was a major Google innovation where Siri was merely an acquisition.

Even if you say that Google have reworked Android to the extent that it's essentially new, the same is largely true of Siri if you look what it was when Apple bought it (small scale, movie tickets and restaurant bookings). The only difference is one is three years on, the other is ten years on.
Well, this is exciting: we've just now passed the halfway point!

items: 1470951 done, 1467514 to do

[url to leaderboard deleted upon request]

(NB: it does look like this thing has been underway since Feb 27)
And here's a scatterplot alongside the data. Feel free to edit or copy as desired:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiBnrQZn4821dHV...
A) The save Mz charitable fund.
B) Some stupid comic that I am creatively stuck on.
C) A raging fever, which is apparently far more productive than either A or B
D) Other super secret projects that I can't mention here.
E) Breaking the rules by cracking jokes on HN.
I think the whole point of critique (esp. in this particular case) is to provide feedback. In both my and the OP's mind, the shirt was created with at least some mild hope that people might buy it. Offering what I consider to be a valid suggestion on how to improve sales is not futile. Now, if the shirt was posted with absolutely no expectation of sales then I would agree with your point.
We're rate limiting how many items/users gets handed out. Because Posterous is very fragile, and we're blowing away their front end caches - which they rely on heavily.

Because of this, we practically hit the back end every time (as well as other users of Posterous, because we blow the cache away) - which makes Posterous very slow.

We've ran a few hundered more threads earlier, successfully making Posterous completely unavailable unfortunally.
wow this is some good stuff. Thanks
Just because a company has lost its media hype doesn't mean it's "dead" yet.

> Investors think differently than you.

How does this bridge the gap from Fact A to Conclusion B?
This post right here is my MVP.

I'm working on a startup-life-broadcasting idea. Basically, you follow me through the process of building my company. Hopefully you're building yours too at the same time. Maybe this is much more transparent than anything you've paid attention to before. So, not just blog posts about how things are going down (ala patio11 or Nathan Barry), but videos, audio recording, actual code, bank statements... like, lots of details, very open. Lots of live-broadcasting. Kinda like the way Justin.tv started.
The NIST contests are great, but I would expect that running such a contest for a hash or a cipher is easier than doing so for most protocols. It is possible to define exactly what a cryptographic hash must do in order to be considered a cryptographic hash. I think one would have a harder time making an analogous characterization of the solution space for HTTP security.

Whatever eventually replaces TLS, I doubt it will be something that could have emerged from a limited-duration contest.
why not use a library that does TLS with an AEAD cipher, like AES-GCM?

Some possible reasons:

* lack of confidence in TLS's design and designers (for example, TLS1.2 still allows compression and fails to counsel against its use).

* TLS has far too many options. I want a secure channel. I don't want a secure channel toolkit.

* TLS tends to be paired with a broken and discredited root-of-trust infrastructure (which often gives the misleading impression that TLS itself was broken).

(nb. I don't have any evidence that the AEAD TLS1.2 ciphersuites are broken, I'm playing devil's advocate here.)

Regarding your 'new cryptosystems' point: I agree, and its completely and frustratingly hopeless. But that's why the world needs a decent secure channel standard with good security bounds, and no knobs on the side which break confidentiality or integrity, and no backwards-insecurity ability.
President Obama Announces New Fuel Economy Standards | The White House
Try refreshing... It's a non-optimized version so it doesn't always load right.
That's very nice, I can see myself using this quite often.

A little feature request -- I am not very familiar with markdown, so I find myself wanting to switch back and forth between "edit" and "view" quite often. A shortcut for this (and perhaps other actions) could be useful. Or even a side-by-side comparison, where the right side would be the rendered version of what the user types in the left side (most screens today are wide enough to accommodate two columns of text).
That's the passage I was thinking of. Compare the implementation and analysis of queues in Purely Functional Data Structures with any introductory data structures book if you don't believe me.
I agree - the purpose of this product is to check if the overall concept is needed. And if so, I will invest in making it a WYSIWYG editor.
while true; end
I've seen you recommend GCM in a couple of places in this topic. I'm not a crypto guy, so I rely on people like you for this stuff.

Other experts I've read (Colin Percival, Thomas Pornin) have mentioned that GCM (and other encrypt-and-mac) implementations are more likely to to have chosen-ciphertext vulnerabilities with respect to CTR mode then MAC.
This is a violation of CAN-SPAM. Feel free to rightfully flag violators as spam.

Clarifying that to submit a valid opt-out request, a recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single page on an Internet website.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
Note to Startups: Not All Mentors are Created Equal
Mostly because I can't stand Javascript. It makes me cringe just thinking about it. Go is much nicer to work with.
Why legacy journalism is dying
It's certainly not my intention to make you feel bad about yourself, or ashamed of your douche website.
I'm as Progressive as they come and you are embarassing me with your writers.
Do yourself a favor and write from the right. Stupidity makes more sense in that arena and stupid is what you bring.
Get lost,
Dr. John Deatherage

Sent from my Nokia phone

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan McReavy
Sent: 03/12/2013 12:37:52 PM
Subject: Re: nwzPaper Journalist Approval

Thanks for your note. It's been filed for future reference.

Best,

Daniel

On Mar 12, 2013, at 4:29 PM, John Deatherage wrote:

Hey, Daniel
I'm really sorry that I read some of the articles posted on your horrible website.
You really need oversight because everything you have is not worthy of professional criticism.
Crash the site and go back to bed. Stop embarrassing Real Progressives with your idiot hack writers (using the term 'writers' very loosely).
JFD

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Dan McReavy wrote:
Hi John,
I just wanted to say thanks for your interest in nwzPaper! You are #463 out of what will be billions of users someday. I see you found your way around and clicked a few links. When you login next time you will see another link in your user drop-down menu. It's the publish screen! Write what you're passionate about and have fun with it. This is designed to be a social news network, so tell others and get them involved, too.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns...doesn't hesitate to reach-out to me! This is the beginning and everything will get better and faster as we go, so let us know what we need to work on in your view.
Best,
Daniel
Founder
Small thing: I bought a slate T, and the confirmation page featured a large image of a black T, I had to go and double check the right one had been ordered.
I'll have a crack at some suggestions, as a Clojure user (nice work on core.logic!) with some Haskell familiarity.

For logic programming: you might find Control.Unification [1] interesting -- and of course if you don't need unification then you can go pretty far with the plain old List monad.

Protocols/multimethods: Haskell typeclasses are really really powerful. Probably my favourite of all the approaches to polymorphism I've seen anywhere, although YMMV (they do lean heavily on the type system.)

Macros: there is Template Haskell [2], which is pretty interesting although I can't claim to've used it myself. It doesn't quite share the simplicity of macros in a homoiconic dynamic language, but at the same time in Haskell it feels like you don't need to lean on compile-time metaprogramming as much as you do in a Lisp to achieve power. (Can't quite put my finger on why).

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/unification-fd/0...
[2] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Template_Haskell
$13 is okay for us non-USians having to pay the $10+ shipping. So, an option for an additional donation might be better.
Don't forget the runner-up,

Unknown or expired link.
OBD-II just standardizes the connection port, meaning that you can plug in the device, but not all cars support the same information and features. Most of them do, but I'm sure that the guys over at Automatic don't want to sell someone a product that isn't supported or tested for their vehicle.
I was looking at refrigerators at Best Buy a while back. Every appliance label had a QR code. I scanned several because it linked directly to the product page on the BB site with customer reviews.
Investors...you mean 'the smartest people in the room' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%... disagree with his opinion?
Please don't link to the leaderboard (the link in parent post), it is a bit loaded and fragile. That is used for all the ArchiveTeam Warriors.

Also, unfortunally - those numbers aren't totally up to scratch. Please hang on, we'll have a FAQ describing that in a moment.
But it's Markdown instead of MediaWiki syntax. Markdown's got a lot of momentum right now, and for good reason.
For large projects, it'd probably make more sense to rewrite the critical code sections in C. rubyinline makes this really easy, and ruby C extensions aren't that bad either.

One time on a contracting gig I had some code that was interacting with cairo drawing and imagemagick. They didn't have a compatible raw image format at the time (one was RGBA and the other was ABGR, IIRC.) It's trivial to convert between the two in ruby, but it was taking 60 seconds per image. Once I switched that one loop to C, it took 0.02 seconds.

I've got nothing against Go, just suggesting an alternative that might make more sense in some situations.
* You should have even less confidence in new cryptosystems.

* Downthread, I suggested that TLS doesn't have as many extraneous options as it appears.

* If you can specify AES-GCM, it is even easier to specify not using default CA roots.

* Using an AEAD cipher removes crypto logic from the SSL protocol (the order of operations and message formatting for getting a block cipher to work with a hash-based MAC) and moves it into the block cipher mode, which (unlike TLS) is NIST-standardized.
It seems to me Draft's key growth action is getting users to share a draft with a friend.

Design the user's first required action to relate to sharing; capture the author's email after they click Draft/Save, and their friend(s) emails when they want to share. The interface could use a little work to encourage sharing as well.

This product is designed to spread itself inherently, so play to that strength!
I'm assuming you're continuing the HN parody and intentionally making a silly comment, but by making such a parody you cross the line from parody to reality. The mind boggles...
A couple of interesting DSLs
Interesting. The "reply" link is hidden for some comments - but not others - such as this one, yet I am able to bypass it by modifying the "reply" URL. Is this something new, or simply something I hadn't noticed before?
If you are interested in a topic and you find a number of titles through casual browsing, how do you decide which one to try first? It's popularity with the general public may be a factor you consider.
What idea? Android? Android was essentially an unknown brand when Google bought it. It certainly wasn't a technology (or at least a technology that has any similarity to Android today).