skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unique salts have to be stored somewhere. A common practice is to just use another piece of information associated with their account. The purpose of a salt is to make various bruteforcing attacks difficult.

All absolutely true.

> It doesn't do much if someone has full access to a system.

Not true. Without salt they can try passwords and if the hash matches ANY in the system they know the password for those accounts. With a big dictionary of likely passwords (or just normal words) many passwords will be discovered very quickly.

With salt you have to try the password dictionary against EACH user (actually each salt value but they should be unique). This makes discovering passwords harder by a factor of the number of users. Yes you can pick any user and run the dictionary and have a good chance of finding the password but you have to expend large computing resource for little reward (possibly worth it to break a bank account but not the average web app).
A mid-career generalist is like not having chosen what degree you're going to graduate college with in your second senior year

Well said. However, being a "very experienced dilettante" is exactly what I am hoping to capitalize on. When I left I was managing and mentoring people that were all older than me. Technology XYZ or tried-n-true architecture ABC is not always the best answer. I do not want to specialize because it forces me into a box.

Truly escaping and starting at run 0 sounds truly depressing. But then, so does the LMS world.
Apple iMacs from China include government malware
Your arrogant tone doesn't really jive with the lack of substance in your comment.

Since you're apparently a professional cryptographer who would have designed a flawless Bitcoin right off the bat; Why don't you share some of your wisdom and point out a few of the amateur problems and how you would solve them?

I'm sure the Bitcoin community would be grateful for your input.
The New Apache
The Visa System - Not working
If it goes away when pressure is applied, it might be trigger points. Find a physio who does dry needle therapy and see if that helps.
Select lines by numbers in TextEdit
Oracle appears to be a victim since they were planning on integrating their own JS engine into webkit.

Apple's webkit looks like it will only support JSC

I would be surprised if chromium decide to support anything but V8

Oracle might need to maintain their own fork of either webkit or blink just to support their JS Engine.
Getting the interviews never seems to be the problem. The resume and cover letter HR screening process is pretty predictable. But not having "5 years experience in XYZ" is continually becoming a thorn in the side during in person conversations.
I think there are 10x developers because the vast majority are 1x.
I have a hard time taking this post seriously. The author over estimates the importance of Hacker News in building a business. If Skype kicked you off their service because they found out you were cold calling potential customers for 8 hours a day you can write a similar post.
Undo a fork is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than making the decision to fork in the first place. Nobody has that on their minds right now.
Under Raw Transcoding Speed: "Intel Xeon (Sandy Bridge – probably E5-2670) – 8 cores @ 2.60GHz"
Also KVM: https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq and
2.6Ghz Sandy Bridge:
https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/available_resourc...
Bullshit. Watch Notch (creator of Minecraft) program. That guy is insanely efficient.
I like your analogy. People have been talking about a "Facebook Phone" for years now, but Home actually makes a lot more sense than trying to compete directly by forking Android or building their own hardware. It feels like one of those ideas that seems so obvious after the fact that you wonder how you never thought of it.
I keep wondering whether I should be buying bitcoins now, but I have mixed feelings about it. I'm pretty sure its value will continue going up for a while, but I guess I'm still skeptical.
It really pisses me off that they are publishing this - the news of Jody's death devastated a lot of people and I don't see what new information is being reported here.

The Guatemala story is hearsay. This makes me so angry.
in languages that enforce spacing 4 makes sense, but otherwise why bother with it?

larger spacing discourages pyramid code (like in python which is stylistically functional), but sometimes (eg: HTML) this is unavoidable, and 4 spaces are a nightmare
There is no offer of proof for the claim that there are no 10x developers past claiming "they've not seen it in practice"

I have seen them with my own eyes.
They are in fact, able to do things 10x faster than others.
There are not a huge number of them, but they exist.
At Google, folks like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are easily 10x more productive than "the baseline proficient engineer".
Any proficient engineer who has worked with them can tell you the same.

Again, i won't claim there are many of these kinds of folks, but they definitely exist.

(This also doesn't mean 1/10th developers don't exist, and aren't common, but ...)
"If we sum up the amounts accumulated at the 609,270 addresses which only receive and never send any BTC’s [bitcoins], we see that they contain 7,019,100 BTC’s, which are almost 78% of all existing BTC’s. This suggests that 78% of bitcoins are being hoarded, waiting for prices to rise."

While I'm sure many bitcoins are being hoarded, the proof presented means nothing since by default all change is sent to a fresh address. So if I had a 100 bitcoins and bought an iten worth one bitcoin I would now own a new address with 99 bitcoins and no outgoing transactions giving the impression that I had never spent any of my bitcoins.

See: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change
Have you looked into CRSP (Center for Research in Security Prices)? I know they have all that data, I'm not sure how much it costs though. Probably not profitable for the average retail trader.
Exhaustivity checking in scala
> Bitcoin is the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without needing a trusted third party.

Really? Just a quick search, and I find: (2007)

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=4...

Is that the paper Bitcoin is based on? According to Wikipedia, Bitcoin was introduced in 2009.

Also, the price of a 51% attack is not that high:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/17gqw0/the_price_of...

I've seen a more recent estimate that it would be $20 million to mount such an attack. That's chump change for a power like the US, or even another major industrialized nation. It's about the price of one older fighter jet and a faction of the price of a current one.
I have an osteoarthritic left knee. In my case the underlying cause was a misfiring vastus medialis, possibly due to an acquired trigger point.

It would have happened simply by walking around as a fat guy.

I get synvisc injections every 6 months and I've returned to training. Trigger point therapy seems to do the rest.
He actually did play the infamous NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game quite a bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g...
> the gnu libc still didn't have it for stupid bikeshed reasons

Yep, still doesn't. Not so much for bikeshed reasons, but more for the Gnu people's stupid NIH reasons. OpenBSD offered it to them, reply was along the lines of "we don't see the need for it".
I was a sysadmin for a company called Loudcloud that no longer exists, but we ran web site operations for other companies. We used to get pitched by a lot of vendors. It was usually the typical salesman + sales engineer combo and I was always frustrated that vendors often had difficultly answering technical questions about their own product.

But not Urchin. The crew they sent to pitch us deeply knew their shit. That was probably 2001 or so. I am not at all surprised to see how well they've done within Google.
How to tell whether I'm a 1/10x developer or not? Often it took me 3 months just to get a asp.net web application, as I'm unable to cope with the frequent requirement changes.
Why do some bank websites enforce an 8 character password limit?
No one doubts that better targeted marketing and advertising can "improve" lives. The dystopian part of this scenario is vesting just two companies with so much power. For example, FB (and Twitter) have already begun restricting API access to apps that are too big or unwilling to be bought out. In the absence of an alternate (or competing) network, they control your experience (and user data). Besides the negative consequences for commerce, there are wider implications for individuals. Dictators and totalitarian regimes sincerely believe they are doing best for their people. That may not be the case.
What are the roles that you've been talking to employers about? Your experience sounds most like a product manager to me: broad understanding of technologies, experience with end customers and the value proposition to them, ability to navigate an organization, and a technical background that drives credibility internally and externally.
For well-defined programming tasks, I could agree that there's a standard "professional" baseline, and that, at most, other developers could be twice as good/fast, at most. (And of course, there are the 1/10 developers too, and even the "negative" developers that do more harm than good.)

But the 10x factor is real. But it comes into play, I think, more for architecture roles, or incredibly key algorithms, etc. It's a whole different beast from "proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain."

These are the developers who have the intelligence, experience, and organizational understand to make the kinds of decisions that keep a team or product running smoothly along, as opposed to getting mired in spaghetti code, rewrites, refactoring, etc. And the larger and more complex projects are, the harder this is, and the more valuable it is. And the more of an art it is, than a science.

The idea of 10x developers isn't that a single developer performs simple tasks 10x better/faster, but rather that they bring such insight into complex tasks, that they can wind up achieving 10x as much, possibly for the whole team, because they make other developers more productive as well. Or, they see a well-defined task, and see a different, better way of doing it, that only takes 1/10th the time. But the 10x is the gain they bring to the company -- and sometimes it is far greater than 10x.
Something seems a bit off about that anecdote to me--exaggerated perhaps?

There's a "highly recommended", "smart", Ph.D candidate developer and he can't do in 6 weeks what the author could do do in 30 minutes, even with the author holding his hand? That's not a 10x difference, that's a 500x difference.
Google Glass Panel from SxSW with API details
The Valley Attitude and Why You Should Get Some of It For Your Startup
You've just described a two magnitude spread between an incompetent programmer and a "rockstar" (I hate that term), with the average being a 1x programmer. I tend to believe that's true because I've seen a few 10x programmers (and I think I've had days where I have been one), but I've definitely seen 1/10x programmers. This sounds about right.
You're speaking truth. We (quantopian) deal with all of those headaches, and test the algos with fully adjusted data. Splits, symbol changes, mergers, divestitures, dead companies, dividends - they're all covered.
Sorry, I actually meant just "element's width" not "parent". But you're right it definitely gets complicated, and you know way better than I do about which pieces are impossible and which aren't :)

The viewport query is a lot easier from an implementors point of view for sure, but it's also a lot less useful from a developer's point of view.

Would it be possible to have a way of only basing the element-specific query off of the state of the element before element-query-level styles had been applied?

For example, take an element that who's height is less than 100px. And say it has a query for `height > 80px` that hid a child element, which then kicked the element's height down to 75px. Technically the query would be undone, but maybe since it is a query-specific change, it doesn't factor in.

And it gets even more complicated when considering well what about a child's or parent's queries on top of that I'm sure.

All I know is while I'm writing these styles, I have very defined things that I want to do, that can be expressed in words perfectly clearly, and if I were able to express them in code it would completely solve tons of headaches I have with managing CSS. Ideally we could figure out a syntax and implementation that can translate those kinds of thoughts into code that works.
Right, but a patent X can only be used to attack technology Y if X predates Y. So once all the pre-Y patents have been struck down you're a lot safer. Even though X might be a totally unoriginal patent, if it predates the technology it's attacking, it might still be hard to defend against. Strike down the patent and it's done - and you cnan't assign another patent in the past.
Not sure if Bitcoins are a good investment. All it takes is a western country (say Switzerland) to create an online currency and Bitcoins will sink faster than a Carnival ship.
That of course it depends on what you call a "developer" and what your standard of "1x developer" is.

I know people who are full-time developers who I would class as less than 1x
Let's say we redefine the definition of a developer to baseline at what's currently stated as 10x. What if the demand for programming far exceeds the supply of 10x devs? Fact: the above sentence isn't actually a hypothetical, it's the current state of the world.

You know what? At the end of the day, it IS harder to teach someone to fish than to fish for them. This is a known fact. This is why developing talent is an investment. You don't just get to reap the rewards from the get go. You invest and hope for a high yield. The person you let go sounded like they had great potential (wrote decent and working code, but just a little slow).

Stop being so damn arrogant.
Recruiting developers: perspectives from the front lines
news events? info from discussions on trading/economic/product related forums? (insider info? dont tell the SEC :P)
There are a small few very gifted people who are prolific coders, and there are a small few very terrible coders who manage to get a job but can't produce decent work.

But FAR more often than spotting either category "in the wild", in my own experience, I have watched poor management turn a productive developer into an unproductive one, or watched circumstance and luck turn someone who's not natually great into a central and productive team member.

I would say, blanket generalization, that at any company that has more than 5-10 developers, team dynamics and management are 10x more important than whether individual programmers are rock stars or duds.
Yeah, I've worked with quite a few ppl like this. Usually they are very smart, read programming books, blogs HN, etc. and interview very well. The problem seems to be motivation, as the author pointed they face a problem and don't have the will power to keep throwing possible solutions at it. Or the motivation to write those 500 lines of CRUD and simple business logic.
Updated the entry with some further examples. You can see how this makes libraries like async (by caolan) unnecessary. Asynchronous functions could just be functions that don't return a value immediately. Other statements that depend on these values being returned by the asynchronous functions would be queued for execution automatically by the interpreter. This makes all async parallel, and async in a series wouldn't even be in the thinking of the programmer.
I guess I don't get it. This Ph.D candidate was recommended by the previous CTO and was the one spearheading the framework transition...and then was fired after 2 weeks? But junior devs at the previous firm were given months to get up to speed?
Then you need to sell yourself directly to someone with hiring power, and skip the HR/phone screen/interview dance. It's possible: I've walked into some positions purely by my reputation. No resume, no interviews, just a conversation and a when-can-you-start. But that means working your network hard, networking more when that's tapped out, and there's no guarantee you'll find something any time soon.

Work your LMS network to find people who will recommend you to their friends outside the LMS industry?

Find an LMS startup that needs a senior generalist to be the "adult supervision?"

Or, yeah, what chaz said: management. Own and run a product team. Product (not project) managers often come from all walks.
Make an estimate when you start a task. If it takes you 10x the time you probably are.
Every time I see an article about bitcoin I do a ctrl-f on the comments for the word "laundering" and come up empty. At some point, the men in black are going to make an example of someone.

As soon as bitcoin transactions tend to be over 10K, the FBI and Secret Service and IRS are going to be all over it. Do what you want with your banknotes. Just be warned: The dealer on the corner taking dollar bills is much, much, much safer to deal with than any digital currency.
Open Source: a Security Imperative
Sadly, technical roles as I yet to get an interview for a Product Management position. Companies seem to all require a certain number of years with that title and I have yet to find the right way of presenting myself. Maybe I should make a more concerted effort in that direction ... thank you!
But the developer tools are in Safari.
Gold does not have intrinsic value.
There are other possible reasons for the perceived math deficit. Factories like General Plastics may be seeing lower scores from job applicants because:

1) Racism 20 years ago may have prevented minorities from applying for jobs at these factories. Now, policies, attitudes, and the workplace environment may encourage more african americans or hispanics to apply for these jobs. The full NEAP reports make it clear that there is still a significant math performance gap between the overall population and whites. A broader pool of applicants, reflecting less racism today, will result in lower math performance. (This performance gap although significant is narrowing.)

2) Sexism 20 years ago could have precluded many women from applying for factory jobs. Now with more women applying, the performance gap in math between women and men may affect the average results seen on General Plastics tests. (Unfortunately, this performance gap hasn't narrowed over time.)

3) Improved opportunities for students from lower income families to go to college (because of student loan programs) may be causing the lower test scores at General Plastics. There is a significant performance gap in math and reading associated with family income, so it is more likely that students from lower income families apply for factory jobs rather than go to college today. Twenty years ago even the better performing students from low income families might not have been able to go to college because of the expense. Now, the better students from this pool will go to college (supported by student loans, etc.) changing the population that will be applying for factory jobs.

I'm not sure if any of these possibilities is true, but they are alternative hypotheses not considered by the article. Notice that each of these possibilites don't imply that things are getting worse, but that things are getting better (over a multi-decade time period--less racism, sexism, more opportunities).
I'm reminded of a paper [1] that "discovered a test which divides programming sheep from non-programming goats." The claim is that there are two distinct populations of people (those who can programming and those who inherently cannot). Each population has its own variance, e.g. as the OP mentions, the best programmer in each population might be 30-40% better than a lower-tier programmer in the same population. But the average programmer in the "can program" population is a magnitude better than the average progammer in the "can't program" population. This seems to closely match what the OP is describing.

[1] http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
I was wondering just the same thing. I can build features and ship code, but I'm definitely slower than my co-worker (who has been on the project for over 1 year, while I'm just in my first 3 months).

How can we measure where we fit on the scale?
If you think Ebert only wrote starred reviews and had TV shows, then you are very wrong, and you have missed out. That's what he is most known for, but his extensive writings and lectures on film go as deep as anyone else in the field.
You're free to feel any way you'd like. I don't have a strong opinion.

That said – Facebook's long record of privacy over-reaches is well established. My hunch is that given the high value a smartphone, and its data, has in people's lives, a position of caution is probably a lot more reasonable than plugging one's ears and saying "Everything is going to be just fine."

Software is changeable. Who knows what they'll do once they're entrenched.

Who knows what will become possible.
2 weeks vs 30 minutes is "a little slow"?

Sounding a bit mercenary but if the ROI on your investment is not high then you abandon the investment and find another one.

It sounds like this developer was not returning a good enough ROI (and believe me I hate using that term with regards to people) on the educational investment being made into him, maybe they needed him to get up to speed quickly and it just wasn't happening.
This.
People forget the impact of good management, supportive teamwor and morale
If worked in a place with the 5-10x devs (at least compared to te rest of the team) but when the workplace is hoatile, people dont eat together, etc. You won't be able to rretain people for too long.
Yeah, I basically agree. His mainstream work is what he's known for, and it's probably why self-avowed intellectuals (academics in film studies or film theory) don't consider him an intellectual. For me it's that even with his online work, he's much more of an everyman than an ivory tower guy, which is why the label of "intellectual" doesn't quite fit. This isn't bad or good, this is just how I see it, and it says nothing about his own intelligence. Finally, I think it's quite possible for depth within a review format. I like the ones in Variety: they're deeper, yet they don't give it away. Then again, they don't have as much mass-market appeal.