skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though it didn't hit Harvard Business Review until 2012, the work
was actually done in 2010. The following has a few more details,
but not many.

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S28/82/93O80/

Like the HBR article, the Economist article also left out too many
details:

http://www.economist.com/node/17248892?story_id=17248892&...

If the details are correct, then the experiment design seems faulty.
- there is no "adding a salt"

Of course there is. As you said, it's an inherent part of the algorithm. But never put it beyond some people to use a trivial salt (or use the same one for all users)

"because each one is initialized with a completely different public salt"

If they follow the proper procedures, yes, building a lookup table is impossible.
People have doing it (drinking a glass once in a while, while being pregnant) for ages without any problems. It's just BS American parents who are fussy with everything.

Oh, and "BS"? Really? It's from medical science.
Because part of the puzzle is in the source code, and if the attacker got the encrypted user table from the common method of SQL injection they don't know the rule which is defined only in the function which checks validation of the pw and generates the pw hash.

What I do similar is,

Pw_hash = hash('f4/$$er3@' + salt + plain_text_pw);

If the attacker only gets the database (which has the hash and the salt) and not the source code they don't have the 'f4/$$er3@' value needed to perform any attacks
Parallel JS (River Trail): soon in Firefox
Sitting on Too Much Money, Norway Risks Going off Course
I upvoted you not because I think you're exactly right, but because I think that the submitter should actually leave that comment and it gets upvoted/downvoted like all the other comments. I've never submitted anything to HN and had it posted on the front page. But I get the idea that you have plenty of time to leave a comment before it gets there.

Personally have really enjoyed reading submissions where the author is the poster, and he's there waiting in the comments to address your concerns and taking suggestions.
Agreed!

The thing about the web is that it was for amateurs. Things like separation of content and style are great for engineers creating larger-scale maintainable sites, but they're absolutely not helpful for new users. Being able to take a text file and add a couple of tags around some text you want to emphasise is a positive advantage for such individuals. It rewards small experiments. Understanding CSS is, by contrast, quite the undertaking.

Hypertext had been around for quite some time before the web, and there's still some academics I know who seem to scratch their heads at the success of such an simplistic, impure form. To me, its simplicity is a reason for its success, while projects like Xanadu make a fundamental error in not considering enough the importance of barrier to entry.
Someone may already have said this: use IP2Country (or similar script) to determine the visitor's most likely location, then pre-select their nationality.
There's no reflog in bare repositories.
The entire thread, starting with your first link, is really great. Tim Berners-Lee even suggests 2 alternatives for the IMG tag. Thanks for that.
Things I wish I had known when starting Hipmunk
I've been showing my little girl both, but I started with Go as it is the more intellectually demanding game. There is rote memorization in Go but conceptually initially it seems to require far less memorization of specific sequences. It seems to be more about spatial awareness, counting, balancing defense and attack and grabbing territory, as well as the if-this-then-that-if-the-other-then-something-else (decision trees?) that Chess has. I may have said this on this site before but I personally am saddened that Go is only just gaining mindshare in the West because it is a far superior game to Chess and I wish I had been taught it as a kid when my mind was more sponge-like. At least my kid will should be able to kick my butt one day which will delight me.
Why did you use a dead rules engine? That system hasn't been maintained since 2007, as far as I can tell. I am serious. My client used it recently too. Why not use a news, faster engine like Drools or whatever JBoss is calling it now?
I suppose that OP wanted feedback. Suggestions for improvements aren't criticism, they're free consulting.
Twitter Ads vs Facebook Ads (from the Advertiser's POV)
thanks for the tips - some new to me places to post..
This is neat. Cool work!

But :-) while your headline is justifiably front-page HN worthy, these are not "instagram filters to the next level". Take a look at all the instagram clones, and their filters. The filters suck. They are usually not very nice, and make most photos look worse.

Now of course the people who dislike Instagram will disagree with me, but as a photographer myself, I can see that most of Instagram's filters are lovingly made, and they do something that most people can't match - and it's not for lack of trying to copy them!

In other words, you can't take a bunch of random transformations and hope to get anything remotely like the Instagram filters. These things take a great effort to make.

Again, no criticism intended of your work - more of your headline....

cheers!
Pitfalls of Ruby Mixins
Better to go out. No doubt. Companies shouldn't be a TV Show drama. Better going before things go bad or very awkward.
Yeah - kind of :) so how do you get to post to that account so the ad goes out on April 1st?
You'll definitely catch a job sooner with knowledge of F#/Erlang/OCaml or Scala. Though knowing haskell isn't a con! If haskell is on your CV, they know you've got the right mindset. Learn scala wouldn't be difficult for you except from a few quirks : In scala, you explicitly define the order of evaluation, whilst haskell is lazy (we don't care). But the scala course last year on coursera covered that in the first lecture.

I come from a java background, but moved to haskell last year. I like both worlds, so scala was lovely to experiment with.

If you come from a functional and also an OO background, you can get the gist of scala in a matter of days.

If you want a decent FP job, one shouldn't learn a specific language, but adapt the FP mindset. from there, it shouldn't be difficult to switch languages and adapt to the technology that they use at the company you want to work for.

In your spare time, just try experimenting with as many languages as possible.
Possibly a mix. The fact that the protocols were free an unencumbered, and reference implementations of both server and client software were provided helped immensely as well. Any idiot could come along and either pick up working pieces or modify them. And they did.

Tim O'Reilly's had a few things to say about watching the Web take off. Its primary competition was closed systems: either entirely closed networks, or proprietary protocols, or both. He wasn't willing to bet his company on any such thing. When the Web emerged, it was clear to him that it was the solution he'd been looking for.
It's interesting to note that choosing not to worry about those things ("privacy, authentication, authenticity") were very much design choices - perhaps the most consequential design choices ever?
The Titanic was built by professionals. Noah's ark was built by an amateur.
not much help here as I didn't really learn Haskell, but from my experience I saw more scala job postings than F#. another fun language you could consider is clojure
Not just a "why use it" page, but a "what the fuck it is" page.

The number of projects I've encountered which don't even have this .... Words fail me.
This is great. Some thoughts:

* It abbreviates "US" in "US Citizen" but not "United States". I would expect both "United States Citizen" and "US" (country) to work too. It uses "British Citizen" vs. "United Kingdom". Both "United Kingdom Citizen" and "Britain" should work too.

* Using ISO 3166 country codes in the URLs would make them shorter.
tl;dr. For job in London, Scala (unless you need to use .NET libs). To get good at FP, Haskell.

In my limited viewpoint, I've seen much more Scala than F#, but that could just be my circles. Though I have also seen some cunning people advertising Scala positions as a crude heuristic to get better Java programmers to apply.

For learning FP though, Haskell is the way to go. Specifically, with Learn You a Haskell For Great Good. I came at Scala after having learnt a reasonable amount of Haskell, but I think if I were learning FP with Scala it would be far too easy to mix up imperative and functional and find it harder to learn the functional style.
Yeah, I should've submitted https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun link instead. Too bad I can't edit it now.
How to change the world? Keep dreaming
For those of us waiting for the continuation course, Odersky seems to be planning one for the fall. https://twitter.com/odersky/status/315048673069379585
Are you doing an MMO? I'm interested. May I write you an email?
A better "because" post from Dr. Simon Wren-Lewis from Oxford - the right thing sounds just too good to be true at the moment:

Here are some better reasons http://mainlymacro.blogspot.ie/2013/03/the-power-of-austerit...
There is also an interesting TED talk of the virtues of copying in the fashion industry: http://on.ted.com/8RlP
Isn't this guy opening himself up to prosecution?
Scala is fine to learn if you need it for work, but it is not very interesting if you already know functional and OO programming.
Most(if not all) Developer Evangelists are developers and do other functions as well (Afaik).

A Dev Evangelist needs to talk to developers and get them interested in their product/service and convey its efficiency to them, only a fellow developer would be able to do that.
Thats something that bothered me regarding mindfulness vs. concentration. Mindfulness presupposes that the "Three Fundamental Characteristics" exist, and have the form described by Buddhist metaphysics. It tells you to take this on faith and go looking for them.

As a secular meditator I would prefer not to make the assumption that Buddhist metaphysics is correct.

I would like to see the creation of a kind of mindfulness meditation informed by secular western developments such as the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger for example.

I think that while the experiences of meditators and shamans of different traditions are genuine, in order to describe and systematize these experiences, they have to rely on the cognitive, social and philosophical resources of their time and place.

The experience might be eternal, but the material of understanding and explication is historical and tied to all kinds of hoary assumptions which often pass without examination.

The critical tools of modern philosophy and continental philosophy in particular can be extremely helpful for the meditator.
Standards bodies ossify over time.

In Europe in the 80s/early 90s, X.25 comms, full seven-layer OSI stack and X.400 email was the "real thing", standardised by OSI, mandated by government procurement and implemented by telcos. This was "commercial grade" networking and email, with TCP/IP and SMTP being derided as "academic".

The IETF were the scrappy, pragmatic upstart. "We believe in rough consensus and working code".

I've not followed many later IETF standardisations, but I did take a passing interest in CAP (calendar access protocol) a few years back. (since there wasn't a good open source calendaring stack (not sure there is now, either, tbh).

It seems to me as a distant observer/potential implementor, CAP would be very hard to get started on. It mandated the use of otherwise unused-at-the-time BEEP [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3080] (for good reasons - the same good reasons OSI mandated their full 7 layer stack...), embedded (unspecified parts or SQL92 (without a grammar!)) and seems to me a daunting prospect. It looked to me as though they were really saying "everyone doing CAP has to really have an SQL backing store with a particular schema and you pretty much have to pass these queries through to it".

So I see OSI->IETF->W3C as a progression over time. Not sure where to now...

[I'm sorry if I'm harsh to the people who put a lot of effort into CAP. I didn't contribute and so I don't really have the right to criticise, but from a potential implementors pt of view, it seemed daunting. I'm also not tracking any current IETF work, so I know I have a narrow view and am likely wrong in many ways.

update: ...and I've just skimmed the final RFC and they do have a grammar for the SQL subset. I recall that that wasn't present in the drafts available at the time.]
I took this course the first time through and really really enjoyed it. This time I got a bunch of my Coworkers to sign up by promising them I could TA the course for them. It should be a good time had by all. Especially since we can then deep dive into parts of it to show how it applies to real world problems.
The actual output from the bcrypt library is:
[salt]$[hash]

You don't set the salt yourself, the library generates it from from a secure RNG.

For someone that's not that into security, it's easy to use and hard to get wrong.
Yes, I'm sure. Your ID (not necessarily a passport) is still checked at the border of the Schengen space (at the entry point) but you don't need a passport or a visa of any kind. You just show your Romanian ID to the customs officer and then enter the country.

There's a document issued by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs: http://www.mai.gov.ro/Documente/Utile/Calatoria%20in%20Europ... (unfortunately they didn't bother writing it in anything other than Romanian) - it clearly states that Romanians do not need visas for any EU country (but they still need either a passport or an ID card).
I don't know about Ukraine but I think that standard of living is not low in EU countries such as Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary or Slovakia. In all of these countries is $12/hour well above average salary. In the CS field it's probably below average, but you wouldn't have problems with finding a skilled student for that pay for example.

By the definition posted bellow they are all 1st world countries. In what I consider a 3rd world country most citizens don't have access to clean water, "proper" housing, health-care, etc... and $12 is closer to a weekly salary. And I'm pretty sure the lowest standard of living is much worse (and affects higher percentage in population) in India or all of the South America than it is in Ukraine.
Did you read that part when he hired someone from different country than USA?
MySQL is a very very small drop in the ocean that is Oracle. Competing with Postgres is a non-issue for them. Oracle's big problem is SAP.[1]

[1]http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applica...
You'd rather have the current situation of thousands of badly implemented datepickers and people loading the complete jQuery UI suite just for the datepicker instead of a simple <input type="date" /> ?
The exercises were not all that difficult (especially given that there were unit tests for almost all of them), but they did have issues. Some of the tests required you to use functions that didn't appear until one or two lectures later.

Most likely the GP is complaining about the fact that the server-side tests were on bigger datasets than the ones that shipped with the code; but that wasn't a big issue as you could keep resubmitting up to the deadline.

I found it useful to remember that almost all of the solution functions were very short; most were one line, some up to five; if you were writing long functions you're most likely doing it wrong. Similarly, the local tests should finish almost instantaneously. If they take 30s with the local dataset, they'll time out with the larger dataset on the server.
Spaced repetition has a pretty good history. If you want a free online alternative, check out memrise.com. They're pretty popular in the language learning community, but they cover a lot of areas and you can create your own. For example, here's there physics section: http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/physics/
Show HN: Task Ranking And Decision Making Tool
I don't know what is a 3-star chef, but "workers" (not managers) in McD make somewhere from $3 to $10 in V4 countries.
The deader, the better? Well, then Julius Caesar's Commentary on the Gaelic Wars must be brilliant!
"... the EU urged Cyprus to collectively punish all deposit holders regardless of balance."

Is this true? I feel like citation is needed for that statement. I thought the EU actually wanted to protect the minor deposit holders, as it has been the case all over Europe up until now.
App of the week - Ask a Spartan
When you’re young and away at school, it can be tough to get reliable information about relationships, mental health, sexual health and sexual identity.

That’s where “Ask A Spartan” comes in.
I think you just re-invented the cell phone data plan in the US. You can sign up for a dataplan with XGB, or you can have 0GB and pay per MB at a much higher cost. Your baseline pricing of $10/month is analogousness to the minutes that you have to have with your phone. Seems to work out well enough for the telecoms.
College Students Developing Human-Powered Helicopter [video]
There's nothing in that article that suggests she "did a startup" though, which is the other side of the coin. She resold some clothes on ebay to make a few extra bucks, and it grew from there.
Graphic Gore Photos: 17-Year-old Kidnapped and Executed - All Monsters are Human
A fantastic site for those interested in meditation is http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/ I would recommend the talks by Gil Fronsdal in particular.

The site has MANY talks on different topics including several courses on beginning insight meditation. As a non-religious person (atheist, actually), I found their approach and presentation to be very easy to accept (eg, a focus on practice rather than faith).
erm, yes. I suggest you try it before commenting next time.
A simple comandline wrapper of ImageMagic isn't really news. But if enought people like it, it's ok. No news for me
Yes, Scala's worth learning. If you've used a JVM language (e.g. Clojure) and know Haskell, it should be a snap. I liked the "stairway book", of which Odersky himself is an author.

Scala the language is great. There are wide variations in Scala code, given that it's a meeting point between about 4 languages (Java, Ocaml, Erlang with its actor model, and now Lisp with macros). Some Scala code is very good, some is bad. But yes, I would say that it's absolutely worth it to learn the language itself. No question.
Functional programming is the most important CS topic if you want to become a great (1.5+) engineer. No, you aren't going to be doing pure functional programming very often. In the real world, eliminating mutable state is neither possible nor desirable. It's extremely worthwhile to learn how to manage state, though. Hell, even the Unix philosophy (do one thing, do it well) was directly inspired by functional programming, though it couldn't be purely functional (infeasible at the time, plus semantic mutability).

TL;DR: If you don't know what "flatMap that shit" means, then it's worthwhile to learn it.
The "don't use bcrypt" is really just think about it before you choose it. He says in the first sentence "If you're already using bcrypt, relax, you're fine, probably."

The other algorithms he mentioned were "scrypt" (mentioned already by GP) and "pbkdf2"[1]. The algorithms really just lie on a line between "well studied" and "theoretical security" with bcrypt in the middle. With the author dismissing bcrypt because its worse than each of the others in one attribute ignoring that it's better than the other in that attribute. Also ignoring that bcrypt libraries are generally more popular and hence more reviewed.

The real point was not inventing your own salting / hashing algorithm.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2
Cheap Indie Developer Hacks Press at PAX
Thank you for your kind words Anton. I am glad you liked it.

Your app screenshots look good, I couldn't find a link to test it though. Would love to try it.
The One Understated Benefit Of Twitter’s 140-Characters Limit
You could have automated!

Not that it often seemed to work very well, but you could bind aliases into simple loops (IIRC, this has been a number of years!) which may have made things faster for you.

I made loops that would make the letters in my name capital and lower case repeatedly (not knowing how to do this 'properly'). The result was an animated name, and usually a hung server :)
"US citizens do not require a visa to visit Argentina. US citizens do not require a visa to visit Argentina, however US citizens must pay a "reciprocity fee" prior to arrival and present the receipt for doing so when entering Argentina.
"

You have to pay the reciprocity fee for a visa as of two years ago.
What exactly do you mean with "dev tools"? Any specific browser?
Thanks for clarifying

Checking the python libraries they make it really easy to use, but you can provide your own salt if you want (you have to manually call 'gensalt' as well)

So pretty safe if you copy their examples.
Bitcoin bubble or new virtual currency?
If you buy this one(1) and load OpenWRT(2) on it, you can probably pretty much skip the RasPi, plus you can stick a 3G stick in the side and be online anywhere.

(1) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=33-704-127&#...

(2) http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3020
What if languages were free?
I have built my own distro before. But that's not the point of what I said. I was saying the Canonical didn't write the software in question and that said software could be installed on any distro. Which means it's a bit of a stretch to blame Canonical for enabling censorship in China.

It's a bit like when people blame ISPs when customers use their services for piracy. The difficulty of setting up an ISP (or distro) is completely irrelevant in this discussion.
I do data analysis and pandas is a huge part of that. He can't usefully write about the whole universe of data analysis. The part he wrote about is definitely quite relevant.
Danger Looming Large In Indonesia’s New E-commerce Law?
Release announcements
Reminds me of the old bulldozer that I very seriously thought of purchasing (always wanted a dozer). But in my case it was only about 5 miles away in a farmer's front yard with a "For Sale: $1,700" sign on it. Getting it home probably wouldn't have cost more than about $300.
Toshio, your comment below is [dead] so I can't reply, but the databases vary from 10's of GB to multi-TB depending on their use.

The DBs are often very write intensive on the master, with as much reading as possible done on slave databases, with tables heavily normalised to try and reduce the disk performance hit.

Most of the extremes of the setup are there for legacy performance reasons - The newer systems using SQL Server 2008 or 2012 and SSD drives generally don't need it, and we're moving towards a less normalised setup.
Really, Americans travel abroad now? ;)
This is great and I signed up. I wish there was such a course with Clojure though. (Just a personal preference.)
China Will Have 300 Million Android Users by the End of 2013 (Infographic)
South Korean Wipers and Spear Phishing E-mails
An Apology To My RSS Readers - But I Had To Do It | John Battelle's Search Blog
I cannot believe I didn't know this existed.

Worth checking out!
No, you're wrong. That would be the old Hartford Whalers logo:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/70/Hartford...
This is nothing but a PR piece by Datastax, from TC.
Nothing, that was my point. For OP it would make a lot of sense to found a company / consult / etc instead of working _for_ a company, to get around his felony.

The part with "worthless advice" was about the whole "oh, also be successful and happy" thing.
Bash wont immediately launch another copy because the PID is still alive (even if it is stopped).
Command-Query Separation in Ruby