skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(being paid to catch unprofitable fish)
Isn't necessarily bad.
I live in area where coal was deemed uneconomic to mine 20years ago with a subsidy.
The result of closing all the mines is that for 20years the area has had the highest unemployment, highest crime, highest drug use and worst health in Europe.
The cost of the social security payments, health care, policing and continual 'renewal' attempts have been many times the saving on buying imported coal.
And such a law could be used to sue competitors.
I too thought there must be opportunities in "disrupting" finance. Then I realized people "want" to be taken advantage of. Of course, not literally. But in a weird sense, people do not want to take responsibility for their finances. Instead they prefer to have someone to blame whom they can replace when things go bad. It seems easier on their ego to say "I trusted the wrong guy" than to say "I was wrong". Of course, that gets exploited by the snakes. This basic mechanism (abrogate intellectual responsibility and substitute (blind?) trust for -- questionable and contradictory -- domain knowledge(s)) is very robust over cycles and will make it very, very hard if not impossible to disrupt the financial industry. Another factor is that for most people, at least in Europe and Asia, money is not a polite subject to obsess about. Instead, it would be easier for people to, again, just have a person who makes them feel good and trust things are in "good hands". Again, in a weird sense, they don't actually want to know all that much detail about what's happening with their money. Easier to say, I gave it to this guy at such-and-such brandname institution and how can that be wrong. Maybe I'm just too stupid to see a way around this. The fact is, though, that all these attempts to give investors/customers more power seem to go nowhere or remain insignificant. There is a reason for that and I think it's not an issue of making it easier. It's a question of do they really want what they say they want?
Clarify the rules. If you value them a lot, negotiate with them. If you are frustrated with their lack of effort, then narrow the field by picking your best one, and letting the others go (or at least creating conditions favorable for that).
Hacking Homelessness
I have my own code I use on my projects. It uses secure SHA 256 hashing for the passwords. The code handles registration, login, logout, and forgot password flows.
The character separating the date and username (♒ if it shows up here) looks a lot like equals to me, and confused me for a while. Just a small weirdness.
I was sure a project of mine was doomed: though once popular, it was imperfect and there was free competition that was the new darling. Ouch. (Oh, and I was bored with it.) I actually tried to abandon it - scuttle it. Today, it's still making money (a $6,000 sale this month), with almost no work from me, while I concentrate on a new, non-boring project. My experience: feelings of discouragement are not always accurate.

Especially if nearing a scary moment-of-truth release date.

You aren't a slave to the project - talk to your partner, negotiate an exit for yourself (with an option to stay).
Web Applications are like a box of chocolates
PHP Quick Profiler
I got a much better idea - why not just spell it hazer?
If it's that close I would finish it. Even if it doesn't take off, maybe user feedback can send it in a direction both you and your partner can get excited about. Just my $0.02.
My understanding is that Scala already wraps lambdas in internal class instances with a `call` method, so I would imagine that CPS will carry a similar performance and memory hit.

It certainly won't be quite as fast as idiomatic Java code, but it should be considerably faster than other non-local exit implementations that rely on exception handling to manipulate the stack.
I suggest "l33t |-|@xx0r n3\/\/5"
Some of your ennui might arise from being too close to the project. You've been working on it for months, you've been close to it, you've made compromises, and now you can't separate yourself enough past choices to be able to objectively evaluate your creation.

Once your project starts getting promoted, can you not iterate? Is the direction you think it needs to move in completely inimical from the version you're thinking of as 'finished'? Can you keep evolving it post-launch?

Do you like your partner? Is this someone you want to work with in the future? Have you discussed your objections to the direction? Have you been expressing your reservations, or will this come as a shock to everyone involved?

Is this something they'd launch even if you walked away from it?

Based on what you've described, I'd be inclined to let everyone know I have deep concerns, get it done, and start work on version two immediately. If at any point in that process I felt too large of a disconnect with the rest of the folks involved, I'd start extracting myself as politely and efficiently as possible.
It appears to be a nice idea, but, honestly, I can't read that green type. It hurts my eyes.
The back-to-top button is the first of its kind I actually used without fear that it would not work somehow.
Not raising fundamental issues with a project with your business partner doesn't exactly sound like a plan for long-term success. Silence is not a communication strategy.
We pass the login and passwords to an openldap server running internally, and then get back the success/fail message.

This is the best strategy for us because it allows us to offer a wide array of services running through our accounts, using out of the box software..

We can tie the forums into LDAP without writing our own, as well as our internal Jabber server, etc.

Once login has completed, we give the user a 128-bit sessionID, which we use for all further communication, until their session expires.
Commissions work only if they influence behavior in the way you want. In this case, you're paying the same percentage commission to your salespeople no matter if they answer an inbound lead or make an outbound call. It's thus rational for them to just focus on inbound leads, because the commission/ounce-of-effort ratio is so much better.

If you want to change their behavior, you need to do one of three things:

1. Require that salespeople hit certain targets/quotas for desired activities or their commissions get a haircut (e.g. you get 15% commission if you hit your target, 10% if you don't). Some possible targets:

* Make at least X outbound calls a week

* Close at least Y sales generated from outbound leads

2. Pay a lower commission for inbound leads and a higher rate for outbound leads. This will require policing so that salespeople don't mark inbound leads as outbound leads.

3. Stop using commissions as a stick/carrot and hire good self-motivated people, like you do for other departments. Here's a great article on that: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20030501/25416.html

P.S. Yes, all calls need to be logged for a commission to be paid. If you can't afford Salesforce or Netsuite, try Highrise. You need to be using a CRM anyway.
We used a combination of Cake Auth
So the law is within the bounds of common sense when it defines the copyright period as the life of the author plus 99 years? The constitution says a copyright is granted for a limited time to encourage artists to create. How is Walt Disney going to be encouraged to create another Mickey Mouse when he's been dead for 40 years?
Are you using TabKit plugin for Firefox (in your screenshot)? Mine is different. Maybe cause im on a mac though.
SecondMarket: The Marketplace for Illiquid Assets
A couple of thoughts:
1. Assign clients to your reps, so that they both don't service the same client.

2. Don't worry about paying commission on a sale that occurred 2 days after the phone call. It is likely the rep played a key role in them signing up, so they likely earned most if not all of the commission.

3. Consider increasing your commission rate and/or lowering your salary (if you are providing one). It seems to me that your reps are not terribly motivated. This lack of motivation can occur for a variety for a variety of reasons: role confusion and rule confusion (see #1 above), lack of financial incentive for new sales/commissions, too high of a base salary. Basically, you need to find the right level of giving them a solid enough base, but low enough for them to be really motivated to make new sales.

4. Add a bonus if certain sales goals are met.

5. Be generous - I've found that a number of startup folks under value the role of sales/marketing in a startup. If you have measurable sales goals and they are meeting those goals, then be generous.
Yeah, I like the code idea.

Perhaps have the sales people give the customers a discount coupon identifier (5-10% or something) when they call. When the customer purchases, if they use the discount code, the sales person gets some part of the commission.

Not only does it help you track who got the commission, but it might increase conversions of people who are interested enough in the product to call you.
How does that fact not make this entertaining?
You're going to have hard time cruising at 100 mph if everyone around you is doing 50. And to stick with the road metaphor, while you could go find some isolated piece of highway and scream down it at maximum speed, you won't necessarily find many people interested in following you (or in academic terms, appreciating your result).

Perhaps having a high IQ slows down some kinds of learning because the holder tends to discount advice that is not presented in an intellectually compelling fashion. Telling a high-IQ child to behave a certain way 'because I said so' isn't terribly convincing. Even though the advice itself may be valuable, an inability to articulate why will hinder its delivery.
Microbe-Powered 'Fart' Machine Could Help Store Wind and Solar Energy (For Real)
Hit the down arrow on your keyboard, twice. Suddenly it just looks like a pretty generic page of text. That's what I do.
Much like the old motto that ideas are cheap, implementation is hard. The answer is simple, put the money(measure) on what you want done. The implementation is hard. Not being a guy with a sales team it is all arm chair from here.

You seem to want to push proactive sales so put the money there at the sign up add a how did you hear about us. If they indicate an advertisement then a sales men would have to show substantial effort on their part to claim commission. If they claim a salesmen then they automatically get commission. If they don't claim anything then salesmen can claim with some effort. If a salesmen pushes an ad then he gets reduced commission for everyone the ad brings in.
A Crash Course In Failure
No. The expensive Nokia 1100 comes from a specific plant. All Nokia 1100 models are not useful in circumventing bank security, just the ones made at that plant.
My favorite quote:

> "By showing them the full complexity of the target language, even at the early stage where all they can do is 'find and circle the subject of each sentence', you are beginning to teach them what their writing will look like on that distant day when what they produce is full-fledged speech. And, critically, you are not allowing them to mistake the crude and lopsided sentences they create in their homework for the real, fluid, and graceful language that is French. "

My Spanish teacher once said that you should listen more than you speak. When you listen, you learn. When you listen, you will be subtly exposed to concepts that cannot be taught well by describing them: how words sound, the flow of a sentence, patterns in sentence constructs (ex reflexive verbs, indirect object), and what sounds right. When you're speaking, you lose that opportunity to learn and you are relying solely on your own knowledge. You miss the opportunity to grow. You are only practicing and you drilling.

Likewise, in coding, this immersion into code is comparable to listening: you learn language patterns and some formal syntax, you learn new 'vocabulary', and you learn what looks right. Writing code (speaking) on your own when you start learning how to program is the same as hardening nonexistent skills in a subject you are completely new to.
No.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/04/time-for-...
So that setting affects the browser window title bar as well?
Since we also have this article - Foxit Reader exploits in the wild - http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2996
So lets all switch to linux :)
> I think there's a quiet majority of people out there who are perfectly happy with Windows

I think there's a quiet majority out there who's never tried anything but Windows, and think of their computer as nothing more than a tool, completely oblivious to such abstractions as operating systems.
Kind of off topic, but Hacker News has changed my definition of 'hacker' -- I almost never mean it in the malicious sense. Good point though, most people probably do think of it in the Wargames or Kevin Mitnick sense (if anyone even remembers him..)
The real question is about the sellers. It might evoke Bubble #1 mindsets, but raising money by selling stock openly (in this case, not an IPO) could be a good way to go.
In the age of web based interactive permission direct response marketing...
...you know what I mean...

...sales people are best used for 2 kinds of products or services.

1. High priced stuff (were a comission makes more sense, also). For example: selling yachts. The website generates the leads and the sales clerk does what he should know best: closing the sale.

2. Upsells. This is for example a seminar to write better content for your new website. You could work together with good writers. The thing is: you new clients, you know they need a good content writer _now_. And this kind of now is the phase were good sales people excel in.
Please don't just use MD5 or SHA1 with a salt.

http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow-tabl...
Honestly, I'm most excited about the seemingly mundane parts of this update: named and default args, and package objects. The big reason that Scala appeals to me more than Haskell or ML for building non-trivial systems is the pragmatic way it approaches real-world program construction.

I think that adopting the best features of existing OO languages like Python (named/default args, first-class packages) and Ruby (flexible syntax for pseudo-DSLs, pervasive use of lambdas/blocks in stdlib for iteration and control) while running atop the JVM is a great strategy.
I am working rolling my own with Struts/JSP.

It seems pretty straightforward (hash pass, place on server, and check against), but I need an easy way to compute an SHA hash in-browser, so the server doesn't have to receive the pass in plaintext.

Anyone know of a way to do it with Struts/JSP, or even JS if its not too slow?
OpenID, if applicable.
Most every web application my team assesses just uses a database of hashes. This is fine; just try to make the hash function take a long time to run (speed is the enemy here). I highly recommend "bcrypt", a routine available in almost every dev environment --- and typically in the better plugins --- for generating safe auth hashes.
The Global Downturn Lands With a Zud on Mongolia's Nomads
I think it can be fixed with a tiered commission structure. Pay X for sales that are made through cold calls etc. Pay X/5 for sales that are made from answering phone calls etc.
It won't seem much different to me than programming your children to believe in their preferred god.
From the 'ripping the bandage off' school of PR - and there's a lot of 'owie' in the comments thread. Cringeworthy stuff but ultimately let's hope last.fm's long term viability increases because of the move, and that people get over the shift fast.
SSL enabled now.
Or the old question, if you're so smart, how come you ain't rich? Smarts often don't correlate with savvy (or IQ != EQ or however you want to express it). I'd happily trade some of the former for more of the latter. For reason and other, I've never been able to exploit my IQ to the extent that I'd like.
You really hadn't heard it before today?
I'm using this extension (which I love):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
I think there's a big majority of computer users, quietly suffering under Windows and simply having no idea that there even exists an alternative.
Anecdote:

I'm sitting in an all-hands meeting at a 20-ish person game company I'm working for. We've just had a project canceled. We go around the table doing a post-mortem.

When it comes to the producer's turn, he pulls out a Game Developer mag, with a post-mortem of a previous project we shipped. We repeated almost all of the "what went wrong" section.

Of course, it didn't seem that way, in the thick of things.

OTOH, I used to be a bit of a process evangelist. I read Steve McConnell and Joel before they were popular. It's easy to single out unsuccessful projects and point to all the mistakes they made, but often the successful ones make exactly the same mistakes.

There's a moment in the middle of a project when it seems like everything's going wrong, and the constraints are unsatisfiable, and it'll just end in disaster. What you do at that moment can make all the difference. Sometimes just refusing to concede the obvious is enough. Often, it's not.

Even much-admired companies like Pixar have their crunch horror stories.
SSL enabled for web front end and the api.
Successfully Adopting Pair Programming
IPhone apps near billion mark
As the analogy goes - coffee is for closers.

Seriously consider getting someone with experience in sales to come and manage the team, and bring processes in.
This is kind of silly:

* The hash you send will probably be password-equivalent; losing it to an attacker is just as bad as losing the password.

* If you're delivering the JS to generate the hash over HTTP, you have exactly the same threat model as with plaintext passwords (attackers will just subst a script that sends the raw password).

* If you have working HTTPS, you already have optimal communications security; just send the password.

* Even if you came up with a challenge-response protocol to make the hash non-replayable, the exchange itself would be vulnerable to a trivial dictionary attack.

Don't bother with this idea. Move on to something that will add real value to your app.
HTTP Basic + https
I use Compare Everywhere and ScanLife apps on my Android.
They scan the bar code and look it up online for you. Saves on typing.
What plant?

Edit: I see, the one in Bochum, Germany.
Since most people already talk about the backend of it, let me share how to securely send the password from the browser to the server encrypted, instead of simply in clear text. (when you can't use SSL for some reason)

+ Server has your passwords stored as sha1(password+salt(password)). salt function isn't secret (eg. reverse the text)

- Client visits login page

- Website generates random token. Then sends back HTML with the random token

- Client generates passresponse = sha1(token + sha1(password + salt(password)))

- Client sends the passresponse, token, and username back

- Website checks for existence of token, removes it, then computes it's own sha1(token + password_hash_from_db) and checks against the sent passresponse.

This way the password is never sent in clear text. Unlike HTTP authentication, this works nicely with html forms since you can do all the crypt in js. Then again, this might be a bit overkill... and using SSL is probably a better option.

Just sharing another solution.
Maybe higher karma users could change the title dynamically like they can change the top bar color?
For those who may not understand the meaning of the domain, "startupdunia" means "startupworld" in Malaysia. I bet that the owner of the website is an indian from Malaysia.
Yet another antivirus company looking for publicity for their patent medicines.
Two possible Apple responses to the netbook
Awesome. thanks
I read a lot, but I have a habit of glossing over words for which I have a vague sense, but not a precise definition.

For a while, whenever I'd read something, I'd just quickly jot down any word for which I couldn't come up with a good definition. Later, I'd look them up.

It works, and it's saved me some embarrassment. Schadenfreude didn't mean what I thought it meant.
Many Unaware Of Alcohol Calories
Dunia in Hindi means world. The owner of the site actually lives in the US.
Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities
Mostly harmless. Or '42'. Just plain '42'.

(if you need to ask, you can't afford it ;-)
http://blog.richdougherty.com/2009/02/delimited-continuation...

It sounds like you will only be able to do continuations within Scala code, not over a call-stack that includes Java/Scala transitions.

(...which is entirely feasible. After all, many interpreters for continuation-friendly languages are built on top of C, which has no continuations.)
"Another classic error we committed was trying to develop generic tools with a view to possible future productions, rather than tools dedicated to the experience of the game we wanted to create."

I wonder if there's a lesson here for programming languages? Kernihan and Ritchie developed C for their needs of the moment (Implementing SpaceWar on a PDP-11) and it became wildly successful as a language. Maybe feedback from actual use generally trumps design up-front for languages?
Nice! That makes me and I'm sure many others more comfortable.
"dunia" means world in Hindi too, in India 【ツ】
Innnocuous News ?
How come the title change? Is this a a witty response to the 'hacker' discussion, or was HN compromised?
In our office you get funny looks if you don't read Hacker News.
Honestly, the registry is no worse from an end-user POV than the /etc filesystem under Linux. In point of fact, given the diversity of file formats and sources in /etc, it's probably fair to say that the registry is equally navigable and understandable to the average Windows power user as the config tree is to a Linux fan. Because keys are typed and support ACLs, it's also arguably better-protected against accidental or intentional breakage.

If you want to attack an ad-hoc config system, then perhaps talk about the mess that is OS X 'defaults', or GConf's half-assed reimplementation of the Windows registry for GNOME.

That being said, I am most certainly not a Windows partisan. The last time I worked primarily on a Windows system was when I worked for a large hardware manufacturer, and the entire company ran on Exchange + Office. That was over five years ago, and I have been almost 100% on Mac OS X + Linux in the meantime, with only occasional use of Windows in a VM to verify IE compatibility.

The reason is this: for the tools I need to be productive (Vim, Ruby, Java, Firefox, MySQL, IM client, email client) Windows is at best equally capable, and at worst a second-class host, to Linux. OS X is about as suitable a platform for those tools, but has a much smoother media (esp. online video) and mobile story. Hence, the advantages of Windows (huge application library, obscure HW compat) are largely moot, while its disadvantages (poor POSIX/UNIX compat., weird dev tools, cost) are more apparent.
Dunia or doonya also means world in a number of Indian languages too. I would guess that it's probably a borrowed term or root across at least some Malay and Indic langauges.
Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009
Oh come on, WMI calls? you're just spreading FUD. Bring a network interface down:

netsh interface set interface name="Local Area Connection" admin=disabled
The suggestion was made

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575855

to have the title for the site be user-configurable. That could be helpful for people who don't want to display a title of "Hacker News" on a work computer.

My friendly suggestion is that if we must change the name of the site, which I like just fine, it would be helpful to call it "Helpful News," so that all of us who are habituated to calling the site HN could continue doing that without confusion.
I skimmed it and went for the tabs. A bad habit of mine, but a lot of users do this, too, I'd guess. It's a good idea, though, I think.