skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few months back, I wanted to get some orphaned files from my ancient Geocities page. I remembered my username (now of the form username.geo) but the password wasn't coming to me. I tried to recover my password but none of the 20 email addresses I gave them was right. Eventually, after being on the phone with customer service and brainstorming every email address I have ever had, the password came back to me -- the original, four-letter dictionary word assigned as the default when I signed up in early 1995.

So, uh, just think about it too much for a few hours and it might come back to you.
"affirmative action for white people"

Not sure I agree, but last I checked, affirmative action for white people was just called "racism".
Yes, I agree that the console is not the main thing that one gets Windows or Mac. My rule of thumb is: less command line use-> better.
Ubuntu is pretty nice and I like their efforts to provide good human interface.
On the other hand there whole bunch of software that runs only on Unix machines and not on Windows. I am irritated every time I need to ssh to a linux machine just to do something simple for a class or project, but I stick to Windows for my personal needs, because I find its interface best for me.
>"Of course, I'm not a big fan of this whole train of logic, because it tries to create (even if just implicitly) group classes that pay costs or receive benefits, and I dislike any world view that attributes costs and benefits on groups larger than an individual."

I respect that position. In general, I do too. I didn't mean to come off like that. I used the affirmative action comparison, because we are all familiar with it.

>"Are you asserting that entrance to state schools disproportionately helps whites? Affirmative action standards work to boost under qualified blacks and hispanics, and hold back qualified Asians. The net effect on whites is, if anything, a bit of a penalty."

So going back to my post, perhaps I should say that currently, residents of the state of Wisconsin, who happen to be white but could be any color, get into the University of Wisconsin with less qualification than let's say . . . the typical foreign student applicant. At the same time, the foreign student will pay more in tuition. Now affirmative action was the first familiar label in my head that could be used to describe such a system. There may be others, or we may want to come up with a more politically correct term for it to use during the course of the discussion.

Again, affirmative action was a comparison I used to provide context. I didn't assert that the affirmative action program at UW helps whites, just that the ADMISSIONS program at UW helps Wisconsin residents. Who happen to be white, but could be any color for the purposes of the discussion.

>"Are you asserting that whites, taken as a whole, get more dollar value out of state schools than they pay in taxes? If so, I'll assert that whites pay a higher percent of taxes than whites make up a percent of state school student bodies."

Again, I am not asserting that white people get more out than they put in. I am asserting that Wisconsin residents, "taken as a whole, get more dollar value out of state schools than they pay in taxes". Absolutely. The amount of money the state gives the University of Wisconsin is, by design, just a token amount. Enough to claim the University as public. So very few of your tax dollars actually end up at the University. For that small amount, tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents are, every year, given an education that anyone else would have to pay 3 to 4 times as much for. Surely you can see the asymmetry there. If there were no asymmetry, in fact, there would be no debate on going private.
Thoroughly Modern Marx
Are price hikes in store for Sun software support?
Mostly Harmless News. Definitely what it should be. DON'T PANIC!
With social media exploding and others (like Google pages) providing ad fre(or less annoying ads), I would think this is shrinking and makes sense to shut down.
I remember my first Packard Bell. Man did I ever hate that integrated audio card/modem! That POS kept dying on me...thank goodness for extended warranties.
don't forget investment bankers
Donyaa means world in Persian, which was the first language of the Mughal Empire. The word then spread throughout Urdu and a variety of other Indian languages.
hmm? http basic auth checks your password on every request. you can do auth other ways, (but you need to be very careful.) but that's how http basic auth works.

the attacker can check one word from her dictionary in the same amount of time it takes you to authenticate one user for one page.

if you make that check take longer than 50ms, it will start slowing down your webapp.

at 50ms, an attacker can check 40,000 words in around half an hour.

you can double that to 100ms, but at that point you are starting to slow down page loads, and it's still only taking the attacker an hour to run through that dictionary.
Was malloc() but now am free()?
AIUI, one reason California is in a constant fiscal crisis is that it takes a supermajority to raise taxes and other constitutional provisions mandate how a certain proportion of the budget should be spent. So it's much harder for California legislators to negotiate a budget than for Texas legislators.
Don't use basic auth, lsc.

[Edit] I regret even conceding this point. Even if you use basic auth, the tradeoff here is not complicated.
Twittering with your brain
Wasn't a member of ID Software an exotic dancer at one point in time?
And if you cannot find one, you should found one.
You use a window manager with title bars?
The idea that cursing customer service representives is helpful is really wrong.

In most cases they have done nothing to cause your problem. Sure, they might not be able to help. But if that is the case, just move on and try contacting someone else. Cursing them out will do nothing, and just guarantee that they probably won't do anything extra for you. You might as well be nice.
Use autohinting [http://www.spodesabode.com/discussion/51/making-ubuntu-look-...] and Droid fonts and u'll see what a difference it makes
There is no such thing as 'sound money'. Being on a gold standard is not a panacea: you're just exchanging one kind of debt marker for another. The US was on the gold standard in 1929 and other countries were on it much later. Booms and busts will still occur.

As soon as you move away from a barter system and give up trading bullets for beans, then whatever you substitute, whether it's gold, greenbacks, or cowrie shells, is someone's obligation to pay - with a bank or government treasury acting as their proxy. The Dutch Tulip mania in the 17th century is a case in point. No matter how treasury power is configured, it will be open to abuse.

This is not to dispute your valid points about moral hazard. However, the 'sound money' meme is nothing more than a fetish which appeals to people who have trouble dealing with the abstractions of economics. In the simplest possible therms: gold is only valuable because a lot of people believe it to be so. Blaming the Fed for everything is a rabbit-hole down which intelligent analysis goes to die. Countries with an independent central back are almost always more stable than those where the government has direct control of the money supply. Today's outstanding example of that is Zimbabwe.
Take them off handling incoming calls for a week and put someone else on. See if your conversion rate from incoming calls changes and by how much. If it doesn't change, the person answering the phone does not need to be on commission.
Best to let the "serious businesses" kill themselves off by ignoring free software and instead spending millions of dollars on inferior-quality products and services.
"Programmers don’t like coding, they like problem solving."

While that's true for me to some extent, but what I also noticed is that I really like doing is building things. When I'm not coding, I woodwork, build RC airplanes, or find something else to work on.
im only 12 and i dont ever get it
Sexual fantasies.
Salesfolk tend to be the most rational economic actors you can find. If a salesperson can make a reasonable living by just picking up the phone and signing somebody up, they're never going to do anything else. Why should they?

If you don't have an extensive sales cycle, there is zero reason why you need to pay commission.

If you want rainmakers, you've got to set up a sales incentive program that demands it, and then brutally winnow out those who don't make the grade. Otherwise, pay them a base salary and then a fixed bonus based on the entire group making quota. Brutal winnowing is still encouraged in this situation, to cut out the losers who aren't closing.
http://ubuntuforums.org
I find that an amazing thing about language, that you often don't need a precise definition, because the meaning is clear from the context. Perhaps 'innocuous' isn't the best example, as 'innocent' is well known and pretty close, but it also works for words that you lack any 'hint' for.

I looked up innocuous when I saw the title change, but didn't really learn anything new.
well then go on a diffrent web site
Yes, you've totally got it nailed.

The best solutions that I can come up with off the top of my head are better tools for watching out for ones financial health.
Calculating Customer Lifetime Value - the Quick and Dirty Method
What caused this bubble is what causes almost every bubble that has ever happened: people see some item that they can buy and sell going up in price over a reasonably long period, they leverage the ever loving crap out of it because it's fairly easy to borrow money to buy something that always goes up, and eventually the damn thing comes down once there's nobody left to speculate on it. Boom! End of story, at least until 10 years later when the economy has picked up again to more or less match where it would have been if the bubble had never happened.

The particulars of any individual bubble are not even worth analyzing or assigning blame over, because the fact is, someone is always going to be willing to lend money out so that someone else can "invest" in a "sure thing." Thus far, I've never heard anyone offer a solution to that fundamental problem short of flat-out illegalizing lending, which would cause a host of other economic woes.

Unless you have some idea to magically smooth out the risks inherent in any market, there will always be leverage, and there will always be bubbles; there may be some reasonable arguments for getting rid of the Fed, but the idea that without them we'd be immune to unpredictable major corrections is just ludicrous (and it doesn't count as a "prediction" if your economic school has always claimed that a crash is imminent because our economic model is too Keynesian).

The Fed is the "fundamental force driving our economy," really? Here I was thinking that what drove our economy was the production and sale of useful goods and services...guess I have a lot to learn.
Repository is Dead: Long Live Repository
Awesome deck: Birds of a FETHR: Open, decentralized micropublishing
Markov Modelling Offers Clues to 4,000-Year-Old Mystery
> I'm completely platform agnostic

That means you don't know anything about platforms (agnostic = no (a) knowledge (gnosis)).

I think you meant: indifferent =)
Japanese manga comic about 3 kids getting into Ubuntu, "Ubunchu" translated to English here: http://doctormo.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/ubunchu-the-ubuntu-...
Because that points to an irrelevant (and downright stupid) "Final Fantasy V Music - Victory Fanfare".
It's celebratory, which is relevant to the context of falling rents/property prices.
the bigger point is that there is a limit to how slow you can make the password checking process. Ok, so let us assume you securely authenticate once per session. How long can that authentication take? I suppose you can put up a little clock... make it take a second and we are talking 11 hours per password, which is starting to get significant... but my point is that the small search space provided by user chosen passwords means that if you make the hash function slow enough to stop an attacker, you are moving into time spaces that users will notice.
Awesome. I've been looking for something like this for a while!
Yup, you were right, no sense of humor.
Right, but you don't plan on making your own glue before doing woodwork, right? It's the same thing - I don't want to write an XML parser, there are tons of them. I want to build something exciting to me.

Fortunately, there exist many someones that do like writing things like XML parsers, so I don't have to be one. I think that might be Wolf's point.
In my Linux days I'd just make a copy of /etc and my home directory and that was always enough to get a new machine, install Debian, run a few aptitude commands, restore /etc and move on.

Try doing it on Windows. There is always a small army of GUI tools, often from 3rd parties, to help you accomplish things like these. Just recently I had to get rid of Adobe CS3 on my Mac: it was easy enough - just run find | grep on your / and you're in good shape. On Windows, big part of the game is played in the registry, and good luck cleaning it up from something as massive and badly written as Adobe software.

Ask an average Microsoft SQL Server user: "WHAT IS MS SQL SERVER?" I mean in terms of files and configuration data that you're putting on your machine when you're installing one. I bet very few people know precisely what it is. MS SQL, just like any piece of reasonably big Windows software, is a complex mesh of files scattered all over your hard drive, hooked up together with a few hundred registry entries scattered all over your registry, and replicating your SQL configuration on another machine is pretty much impossible without yet another complex Windows GUI tool. Internet Explorer is also like that: there are all sorts of hooks and back doors in the registry that you can stick your DLL into, to be loaded and considered a part of MSIE the browser, so an average user, without additional GUI guidance, has no chance of figuring out where all these popups are coming from, hence the need (and a big market) of various spyware/adware removal tools. On Linux/Mac these tools make no sense: a 10 line bash script would accomplish all they do. The reason? It's the registry, the biggest engineering fuck up in the history of Windows.

This is why I hate seeing Gnome moving in that direction - their Gnome Conf is a reincarnation of the same "wonderful" idea: to badly re-implement a file system in sake of elusive "centralized configuration storage" advantage. There isn't any advantage in centralizing your config in some non-standard complex format: you aren't gaining anything, you're loosing a huge army of tools and techniques and people's knowledge which standard file systems come with: just use them, store you config files as files in a file system, it's freaking great at storing files.
This article doesn't factor in the value of the writer's time. Ignoring opportunity cost is a major no-no.
DVRs were supposed to undermine television. They have done the opposite
My fault, I made an ASSumption about the articles message but I understand that nationality != race, I live in America after all. :) Nevertheless, I still believe articles that promote racial pride keep racism alive.
I'm using "New Wave" theme which has a very pleasant muted gray and black look to it. It's very easy on my eyes.
Is it easier to understand the problem when you rewrite the code instead of reading it (twice)?
Don't worry, it will only last for the current server process. I just changed the name in the repl.
Wacky, all volunteer Open Source Bridge conference previews speakers and topics
If I was a pbay lawyer and I knew this info, I wouldn't release it right away. This way, if the judgment is for my clients, great! If not, I can then release it, claim bias, and get a new trial.

If I released it right away and replaced the judge, I won't have an ace up my sleeve if the judgement goes against my client.

It's pretty smart actually.
Yeah, I think you're referring either to Stevie Case, a "gaming grrl and Quake champion who became a developer and Playboy model" or "one fellow who took up game programming after he abandoned a shot at the ministry and become an exotic male dancer who went by the stage name Preacher Boy." http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DHVHM25YIBWO
I've believed for years that public universities are essentially doomed. The idea of professors primarily being researchers with a bit of teaching on the side carries too high a cost.

Instead I think states should adopt a four-year community college model. Hire people to teach and not to research. I know most university educated people look down at community colleges as little more than extended high schools but the people I've know that have attended community colleges said the quality of instruction they received was much better than at the university level (most went on to get a university degree).
Given all the complaints about the increasing popularity of the site, I was more expecting "Boring News, Nothing Funny Here, Go Back to Tech Crunch" or something.
It's time to admit that the Web was never intended for long-term storage, with staunch personal sites the rarity, and fads, and news (up to 4 weeks old) is the trend. It's just a total failure, archive-wise.

Note: Why don't they just sell Geocities to someone who'll keep it going?
Dunia means World in Arabic too.
And if I picked a Linux distro from 8 years ago I'd find some bugs in it too. Use the current version of Windows, it has fewer bugs.
Adeo Ressi Fights “Atrocities Of Investors” With New Class Of Founder Stock
The someone who wrote that XML parser was likely also trying to solve a problem, and not just for themselves, but for many.

I know for a fact I hate drudging through writing custom classes, I've said it before and I'll say it again, when I'm doing tedious repetitious coding of things like a parser, I tend to start feeling like a glorified data entry clerk.

but when it's time to see that parser in action and use it to solve real problems, especially by many different applications, THAT is the reward.
I've used Windows pretty much all my life, but started out with Linux (Ubuntu, briefly openSUSe and back to Ubuntu again) a couple of months back.

I don't see many problems with Windows apart from it doesn't like moving User documents/data to another drive. The resulting clutter from that is all down to me though. I haven't had an complaints with Vista.

I'm warming more to Ubuntu now (although I only use it as a development platform on a laptop, I'd probably prefer it even more on the desktop) but I really don't see the "horrors" in Windows.
Actually for small enough matrices (as you might imagine) the matrix multiplication in PHP is not horribly slow.
Not a surprise. I've lost my faith in humanity, belief in goodness of anything, and trust into anything outside my own head long time ago.

"A previous arrest in which a policeman tried to _force_ my
arm back there despite my protests caused me injury and
pain, and the policeman's supervisor six months of
paperwork, all of which I attempted to explain to a
shouting, tugging, and threatening Corporal Underwood to
limited avail. "

Just proves how strangely fucked up our world is.
Fluorescent puppy is world's first transgenic dog
I don't really agree with this article at all.

I think a large percent of programmers want to rewrite things because they focus on what's lacking in some way, expect to do everything better than the next person, it's easier/more fun/feels more productive to write than to read/grasp other people's code etc....

He quoted Andrew Leonard quoting Larry Constantine but took a light-hearted sentance and seems to deliberately misunderstanding or taking it too literally.

But the rewrite/reuse issue needs to be addressed in a per-case basis... but I've seen thing beeing rewritten way too many times that should have been reused and usually ending up in much worse shape after that....

Although, I've also seen rewrites that improves stuff a lot.. but usually it's very very obvious when that's the right action to take.
(Disclaimer: I'm doing light-volunteer work for them, but am in no way a primary organizer.)

I am really looking forward to this event. It's got the spirit of a BarCamp (and one free-for-all unconference day), but the "curation" of OSCON or a more traditional event.

It's a really good mix of some big name speakers like Rasmus and Chris Messina, and not-so-big-names, giving fresh topics a second look.
You're not considering that they also need to grow the endowment to keep up with inflation; their estimate seems to indicate an expected return of 2% over inflation--a more reasonable projection for long term conservative investment.
You are thinking what I am thinking. The OP definitely gives off the vibe that he doesn't actually need a sales team (it sounds like their business comes through other channels and the sales team is acting like a customer service desk).

So it would be good to review whether that team is necessary, before spending much brain time revising their incentive structures.
Breast Feeding Social Networks | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Programmers DO Like to Sleep

That's probably the biggest reason we rewrite stuff. So we stop getting those calls in the middle of the night.
A biological basis for the 8-hour workday?
I swear Hacker/Innocuous News is following the programming languages class I'm currently taking. In the last week we've gone over tail recursion and the Markov model and in the last 12 hours they've both made appearances on the front page.
On average, the attacker will have to search half of the hash space to find a given password. So, your 40,000 searches is way too small as long as you require more than 2 character passwords. If you assume lowercase + uppercase + numbers for the passwords, and require at least 6 characters, you get

(26 + 26 + 10) ^ 6 = 56,800,235,584 combinations

searching half of that would be about 28 billion combinations. At 50ms each, that would take 388,888 hours, or 44.36 years.
It's frustrating when people put so much effort into trying to shove the dynamic block through the static hole.

I develop mostly in C# and love it, but have absolutely no interest in a "compiled" or more-static JavaScript. JavaScript is a great language as it is (ignoring the DOM mess).

I spent most of the podcast wondering if Yegge hasn't seen Script# or JSLint, and wondering why Joel's architecture astronomy alarm wasn't going off.
Gantter: Project Management in your browser (imports MS Project files)
How is the title unwelcoming to newcomers, and what does this have to do with religion?
Half a year ago, Joel (now, don't downvote me for mentioning him ;)) had some sensible things to say on commissions : http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-si...

I'm not sure if this article will help, but it may definitely make you aware of some possible problems with commissions.
I'm always conflicted on these things. For privacy's sake, I don't want every little thing I posted on my angelfire page many years ago to be a part of the world's permanent record on me. But I can't help but feel we are losing a lot of valuable information about ourselves when these things go.

I dunno, maybe if we had a way to keep it around but under a lock and key. Then we could release our incessant teenage babbling's when we think they are "cute" rather than "just crazy enough" to draw the ire of some h.r. sheriff.
What a reminder how the Web keeps changing. I remember when I thought Geocities was kinda cool. Can't really remember too many sites like that-- which remained essentially unchanged, yet had such a userbase for so long. In fact, I can't think of one other.