skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you hit the nail on the head with that. Snake oil salesmen. People seem to want to pay to be told something you can read in a book. Its taking money off fools.

Buy a book and read it. This one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Grow-Your-Own-Vegetables-Larkcom/dp/...

This is the only gardening book i own. People keep buying me new trendy ones etc endorsed by celebrity morons but they usually end up being re-gifted.

This is good for anywhere in the world as well even though it primarily targets northern hemisphere.

Decades of advice, concisely compiled. Its the SICP of gardening.
"I had considered only my ambition and values, without stopping to think in an honest, meaningful way about what would make me happy on a day-to-day basis"

Sad thing is, most people don't think about what makes them happy. They simply try to live up to societal norms & expectations.

Here's one of my favorite quotes from John Lennon:

"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life."
> If the bird is the word, three must be the number.

I can't help but liking an essay that starts like that.
You could skip a lot of work by buying already potted plants. Let a professional do that, it's not worth for the 50-100 you need. Steel cages are great if you have 20-40 year plans or have money to waste. Otherwise you can buy a few 2X4s and then create some sort of net with sticks and wire. Each plant is then tied to it and you direct the bigger branches to spread. Yeah they need some fertilizer for better production and maybe pesticide but that's about it. If the land hasn't been used for ages, it will be even better.

Of course you can walk into a nursery and come out of it with $2K in equipment, but it's not really needed. You may get say 1.25 lbs more per plant more but...you can plant more and work much less. Tomato plants are resilient and there should be no drama when growing them. Plant them in stages, tie them to the "net," water them, remove the grass and maybe spray them with pesticide. That's all folks!
Ahahah thanks. :)
I can't be too sure if the price is too high, and am skeptical on how much the price can rise. If it's truly are bubble drive by just pure speculation, it's really a shame that we now see the currency as just another penny stock rather than a true universal virtual currency. Cheers.
Over-the-top or through the network?
The etymology of the term is not the same as the etymology of the idea. The idea goes back at least centuries, if not millennia. That popularized term was coined in a work satirizing the idea, doesn't intrinsically make the idea satirical or a bad idea always deserving of satire.
Too bad the "war on terror" is still going on. Maybe once it's over, the whole world can join in and start a "war on IE" and send the responsible parties in Guantanamo.
I do totally agree. The characters are some of the most beautiful ever written, and I spent days and days in a hammock unable to tear myself away from it.

But if I judged the book after just 30 pages, I probably would have said that it was dry and boring with too many characters, and too little happening.
Meanwhile in congress
True, great analogy. But answering your question, I prefer the first of course. But you have a greater probability of finding your special someone if there's some initial chemistry, right? Again, the first date isn't everything. But first impressions matter a lot for what comes next.
Weather has been rubbish so far so you're doing the right thing. My tomatoes are about 2 inches high and on the living room window sill at the moment as I wasn't confident I could avoid last frost. Avidly watching weather reports!
Why blog? Why run a blog? Why bother?
Education For Everyone-Take The First Step in Furthering Your Education
Setting Type for User Interfaces
Hence the filter bubble issue. When are we really open-minded if we always choose to what our minds are open for? I for instance can't deal with Zite's logic, trust me I've tried.
It's incredible to see how different the market is in the US than in the Netherlands - and I think we're in line with most other European countries.

Interning at big guys like Microsoft or Google is almost entirely unheard of. School never even told about the possibility of being asked technical questions during an interview; interviews are supposed to be a 15 minute conversation about ourselves and about the company. We're always assumed to get an interview. "Startups may hire only one or two interns" is normal, companies hiring more than that are extremely rare, and if they do it's usually because they're too poor to pay real employees. In fact, 3/4 companies I've been with hired interns because they're (very) cheap.

So that means no pay. Not that I'm looking for wages, I'm looking to learn something, but still. It turns out the better companies also pay more (or at all), but I only learned that very recently. I never even knew it was customary to get a monetary compensation for your work until a year ago. It became most obvious when I was (almost solely) working on code for mission-critical systems without payment...
Bit expensive doing it that way. My toms cost about £10 a year, usually to replace the rotten bamboo sticks and for tomato food. Seeds come from last year's :)
Yeah, that always bugged me about Holmes. He specifically restricted his fields of knowledge to things that could help him solve cases - so how did he know this in advance? He had encyclopedic knowledge of the muds of England, for example, but Watson was shocked to find he had never heard of the Copernican system of cosmology. So it's damn fortunate he was never engaged to investigate anything involving an astronomer, right?
One of the NULL dereference diagnostics looks spurious:

DomainName = &PolicyAccountDomainInfo->DomainName;
SidNameUse = (PolicyAccountDomainInfo != NULL ?
SidTypeGroup : SidTypeUser);

This does not, in fact, dereference PolicyAccountDomainInfo, but simply performs some pointer arithmetic. It’s bad style, agreed, but should be entirely harmless to execute.
So many comments and noone referenced the ultimate article on sleep subject? http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
Read at least the first couple of pages before you start using any "pro tips" that can be found on the web. It's too easy to harm yourself, your productivity and learning ability.
>> I have a friend about "level" with me but on the West of the country and he struggles with his garden.

Good! Anecdata or not, that's going to be my new excuse! :P
This is probably on the lines of the vibrations causing the plants to stiffen up and produce better supporting structures. You can do the same thing by pointing a desk fan at your seedlings for a couple of hours a day.

Metal is cooler though :)
Hi, creator here. Unfortunately that's not how CSS works. See here for more information: http://joshnh.com/2012/10/12/how-does-line-height-actually-w...
I thought a hash being relatively slower makes it better.

Because then it would take more time to brute force. I mean if hashes were near instant then even without any theocratical collision that wouldn't be good, that hash would fall faster than a slower one!
Teaching Better Technical Classes
For London I strongly disagree.

When start-ups, profitable ones, are offering £35k + bonus + stock options (worth £0), for senior developers, in Central London, there's not a talent shortage.

Similarly skilled developers are getting £35k+ & bonus outside of London, where the cost of commuting/living is significantly cheaper, in established companies with full benefits packages, that don't expect them to work 50 hour weeks. Inside London, those devs who are working in finance are getting paid £45k+, big bonus, gym, laundry, etc. thrown in, with the same workload expectation.

Experienced (and good) Senior iOS developers in London are regularly being offered less than £40k.

No surprise many talented staff have left London, for equivalent salaries, less stress and cheaper cost of living (especially as they hit the age where kids appear in the picture).

No surprises many younger devs look at the £25k starting salary in London, where transport and rent will cost them £1000/month, vs. £25k out of London, where it will be more like £500/mo, and decide that London is not worth losing £6k/yr after tax.
Very cool project. Nothing like having your tests run every time you save a file... in several different browsers if you like. This and docco made me think about about node differently. Though it is a server side JavaScript framework, it has also become a platform for developer automation tasks.
Ok. VERY good point! Hadn't though of that. Thanks!
'Sleeping time' on a plane is fairly independent of actual time outside. It's when the crew want a subdued, calm and restful (and hopefully asleep) cargo of passengers.

It's akin to hanging black curtains in a babies room to ensure the best chance they'll sleep for as long as possible before crying for mother's milk (or another scotch and dry).
Getting a job at a startup
I'm fairly new to exploring the startup world, I was wondering if breaking into startups as a CS major from a top 10 undergrad CS program would be difficult.
I'm currently about to launch a mobile app startup sometime in late June most likely (sophomore year summer), will hopefully have a startup internship next summer. I'm trying to gauge what experience most people going for a startup position have at the undergrad level
That sounds weird. There's an "intense hacker school" in the SF area that lets people graduate without being absolutely flooded with leads to at least FB and Google?
The article below the video, that clearly shows the system mounted on a full-size helicopter.
>> Try less hard

:) "Tried" that too :D

I've taken a 2-year sabbatical from all things muddy. Let's see how things go the next time. Fresh eyes and less anxiety!
Why do I need to use em? I thought browsers handled things like zooming on their own nowadays. What's wrong with px?
so i read this correctly over half of the produce was lost with so much effort. fertiliser and soil treatments people! fish heads. hipsters got too much time for their own good
Hash functions are generally designed to be fast. For the very concern you mentioned some people prefer using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt to store the password, which on the other hand is designed to be slow.
Why does this video need to be captured by a lucky passenger who found amicable crew to let it be recorded? Why don't we have videos like this published by airlines?
Show HN: Readable.cc RSS reader
Modern brushless gimbals actually deliver really good stabilization - probably not as perfect as this and maybe not good enough to carry a Red, but take a look at this for what is possible with a GoPro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch2iRCWZfKc
So, essentially, it's not about shutting the window because it's dark, but ensuring the window is shut before it gets light again?
Agreed. If you are worried about the syntax for plotting, take a look at Gadfly, which aims to implements the Grammar of Graphics language for julia.

https://github.com/dcjones/Gadfly.jl
So, I made this. It's a readable feed reader that promotes interesting content based on articles you vote for.

This is not a finished product, I'm trying this "release early" thing. I figured the timing is right with Google Reader disappearing.

Readable.cc is open-source, built on Swiftlet: https://github.com/ElbertF/Readable.cc
Depends on the application, if you use a hash as a checksum you want it to be as fast as possible.
>> Chillis are a pain. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

:( Tell me about it! Neither did tomatoes, nor did Bell peppers/Capsicum, nor did those Courgettes, neither did the marrows, sugar snap peas... oh sugar!

I am going to find a safe, dark place, and crawl into foetal position!

>> I've been doing it for 20 years and still manage to ruin something every year!

+1 Hope springs eternal. Thanks.
> Tomatoes are great, they generally need very little attention and will fruit under even the worst gardener.

I'll attest to that. We had a garden last summer for the first time in my life and we planted about 30 tomato plants. We started them in trays, transferred them into turned-and-fertilized ground when they were about 5 inches tall, watered them regularly, fertilized them occasionally, spent an hour or two weeding each week, and pinched off the suckers from time to time.

That's pretty much it - and they produced an impressive outpouring of the most delicious ripe tomatoes. That was during a brutally hot summer with hardly any rain (and the rain we did get was torrential).

Granted, we got lucky with the tomatoes, but not everything turned out as well. The carrots were tasty but small, and we didn't get any squash, peas or Brussels sprouts. However, the herbs did great, and we got lots of golden beets, onions, leeks and scallions (we froze the latter at the end of the season and we're still eating them). We got some cucumber but not as many as I would have liked.

Our first batch of lettuce was completely clearcut by local bunnies, but our second and third batches were much more successful. We even planted mustard greens and Russian kale in early August, and we enjoyed them right up to mid-December when we got a hard frost and a heavy snowfall.

One of the highlights of our summer was the period when everything aligned and we were able to enjoy salads composed entirely of stuff from our garden (plus dressing).

I'm already looking forward to gardening again this year. I learned a few things (the hard way) last year and hope to learn plenty more in future.
As someone who lives and has worked in London this is really incorrect.

All of the people that I know who work in London (not just in banks) are earning at least £35k+, almost always more than that. These are newly graduated developers, with lots of room for advancement.

Conversely I know very few developers outside of London who are earning close to £35k, outside of London its much more likely to be research (ARM etc) and they tend to pay ~£28k
> I thought a hash being relatively slower makes it better.

Depends on the workload, and the article does not explain anything there so it's completely useless.

For "slow hash" workloads such as password hashing you want a slow hashing function, but none of the three hashes listed is acceptable for password hashing anyway so their comparison is not really relevant (they can be part of a password hashing strategy e.g. as the crypto hash function of PBKDF2 through HMAC[0], but in any case you'll want to size your iteration based on the acceptable time spent hashing in the normal workflow).

For things like checksumming, you do care about checking throughput and you care that payloads are hard to craft (so it's not feasible to alter the file but keep the checksum unchanged), depending how important the checksumming is you may accept tradeoffs e.g. if you want to be resistant against accidental corruption CRC32 might be enough (very fast but easy to fake), if you want to protect users against malicious attacks (e.g. distro package repository) you'll want a good cryptographic hash as validation is more important than raw throughput. MD5 can work there, maybe more on the CRC32 side or as an early validator (e.g. with a fallback hash so MD5 is used to weed out some stuff fast and potential false positives are eradicated through a second hash function)

For hash maps, you want speed and spread across buckets.

To provide flexibility, core crypto hashing function try for two goals: 1. throughput speed and 2. limiting collisions

[0] if you want to hash user passwords — and you should - there are currently three known good choices, all variable workloads (means you can increase the number of "rounds" without decreasing the entropy, making the passwords as hard to crack as you can afford): PBKDF2, Bcrypt and Scrypt. The first 2 are CPU-hard (the variable workload deals with the amount of computation only), the last one is also memory-hard (it also takes a variable amount of memory — configured when hashing — making it much harder to parallelize on GPU or ASIC). The point of variable workloads is that as CPUs improve you can add more rounds to the process to keep up (for instance the original PBKDF2 RFC recommended "1000 iterations" in 2000, the current standard is generally 10000~20000 and OWASP recommends 64000. Generally speaking you want to give it as much time as you can — on your production hardware — without user disruption, shooting for at least 250ms is a good idea in most systems which'll only rarely need to "login" users and apply this delay)
Highlights the absurdity of 'intellectual property rights' law. Like being sued for playing Bach or Chopin to an audience in terms of the digital era.
> For password storage it is still secure

MD5 has never ever been secure for password storage, and now less than ever.

This also applies to all SHA by the way, a cryptographic hash is not acceptable for password hashing.
Show HN: RedScript, a Ruby flavored compile to JS language
| "including hashing your user passwords"

Using a hash algorithm for password storage is just plain wrong. Use something designed for password encryption instead, such as BCrypt
I tried. I spent $100+ dollars on various digital antennas but because of my location/trees/neighborhood, I barely get one or two channels, none of them clearly.
No, no, no.

First off, MD5 is said to be insecure. Sure, but only for some purposes. This very recently appeared on the security stackexchange website[1]: Why does some popular software still use MD5?

In the SHA-1 chapter he mentions that you can truncate SHA-2 outputs if you are concerned about storage space. No! It may be entirely safe or even desirable in the case of SHA-2, but how can you be sure? It might very well be designed differently. Never invent your own crypto. Another recent thread on the security stackexchange mentioned[2]: "The fact that you need to ask this question is the answer itself - you do not know what is wrong with stacking these primitives, and therefore cannot possibly know what benefits or weaknesses there are."

Then the article goes on about SHA-2: "Sha-256 should be chosen in most cases, including hashing your user passwords" Oh God no. Use bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2--I don't care. Don't invent your own crypto. Hashes work great for storing passwords, but hashing algorithms aren't invented for password storage! Hashing algos are supposed to be fast (see the SHA-3 competition, they were looking for algorithms that were especially fast on hardware implementations as complement for SHA-2).

And then lastly, testing only a single implementation (the one in .NET) is hardly a good comparison. It doesn't matter much how much hashes you can do per millisecond, especially since secure password hashing algorithms are supposed to run slowly.

All in all, have a look at this if you want to know the real answer: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/211/how-to-secur...

[1] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33108/why-does-s...

[2] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33531/why-improv...
I'll gladly pay more for something that works over paying less for something that doesn't. I tried actually using Google Drive for real for about 3 days and it was pathetic. Also no Linux client. Ponied up for a bigger Dropbox and haven't had a single glitch in a couple months.
Let me get a little whiny and off-topic here: the video is beautiful, but I wish people mostly stopped using Vimeo until they make their player more resilient.

It doesn't seem to degrade video quality if your bandwidth is low, it seems that my bandwidth to Vimeo is generally lower than with YouTube, it handles buffering very poorly, it's jittery on some less powerful computers, and the player itself loads noticably slower than YouTube.

For this reason, I hesitate to share the video with others, even if it's great. People going through their feeds have better things to do than wait and give up on content I attempt to share.
True. I didn't even realized we could see the northern lights on such a common flight route (and I realize now that it was pretty obvious).
The essay hits on the right notion but I think needs to be expanded further. Bottom line is that the most important quality of a leader is that people will follow them. While the individual is a significant factor in this, context/circumstance are also important. Often the ideal combination of leadership "merit" might not reside in a person who is of particularly great "merit" outside of a particular leadership role (though it is pretty rare in someone who is absolutely useless outside of the role).

Also note that it is people _will_ follow them; it's about the future and therefore speculative. No amount of examination can confidently predict who will speculatively be best able to lead.

A "meritocracy" therefore is founded on the notion that the intellectual talent and past accomplishments can confidently predict leadership ability for a context that we can't entirely predict... Yeah, when you got that nailed down, let me know. ;-)

At best a "meritocracy" functions by making an educated guess, based on past evidence, who is best able to fulfill a role, regardless of whether that person's currently role is being fulfilled with any degree of merit. In short: it is undeniably imperfect, though one case make a case it does at least as good a job of selecting candidates as any other mechanism... with the possible exception of a democracy (it's kind of hard to beat working off who the electronic says they'll follow). But more than that, it has a problem: people like meritocracies because they feel like whomever is in charge has "earned" the right to be there by virtue of having the best record of _past_ accomplishment... despite the fact that a well functioning meritocracy would select based on the expected record of _future_ accomplishment, not on the record of _past_ accomplishment.

This subtle difference eventually leads to disappointment, disillusionment, and cynicism, which is undermines the integrity of the leadership of an organization, if not the organization as a whole. In short: even assuming you overcame the issues of observability raised by the article, a utopian meritocracy might not be the utopia imagined by its subjects, which can lead to an unstable society...
Freakonomics. Utterly boring (to me) at first, but the more I read the more fascinated I became. So much that I read the second one.
> Sha-256 should be chosen in most cases, including hashing your user passwords.

NO, NO, NO, NO. How many times does that need to be repeated. Don't use SHA to hash passwords!
No no, not at all. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Sometimes I get frustrated, when f.e. I want to get concepts of a new programming language, and learn it fast. I can't understand that f.e. it's so hard to find a good book/guide in under 100 pages. But ok, that's for the technical books.

So, no sarcasm, I agree with you about the first 30 pages :)
HN auto-links URLs in your post (eg. http://supplybetter.com), but you need to include the http://.

(I find auto-linking lowers click friction for me, personally.)
I particularly like the way that the Jet Ranger changes colour in the photos
Create a VPN with the Raspberry Pi
Any tips on growing tomatoes in an apartment? Don't have much access to land here in NYC, but we do have a decent south facing balcony. Does anybody have experience with those upside-down tomato planters?
Show HN: Crawling car dealerships for a real time consumer search engine