skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does this spell doom for ad agencies?

My theory is that advertising agencies will eventually go the way of travel agencies. Big ad agencies will still exist, but they'll be forced to downsize as they face stiffer competition from the sort of decentralized indie distribution methods that make crowdsourcing work so efficiently and effectively. Look at what 99designs.com and crowdspring.com do for graphic designers, and apply that to the advertising industry; it would be fairly easy to set up a site that crowdsources advertising and rewards the actual producers with a larger share of the advertising company's advertising dollar budget. Perhaps a question of when more than if.
In Linux, you use taskset to set CPU affinity. Not sure why you'd think to suggest nice/renice, since nothing related to them was mentioned.
I gotta admit, that does seem a bit lacking.

I salt MY hashes.
And it is fixed!

What was causing it?
Specifications, paradoxically, always lack specificity. There are always lots of things you can get into an discussion about. A good client understands that specifications change, that work is incremental and that you wish to be paid accordingly.

Every experienced developer should know that nobody knows how to estimate how long something is going to take. Even the best developers I know always fudge their numbers by a factor of 2 and that is after they have sliced the work down to parts that take at most 4 hours and used all other tricks in the book to get decent estimates. You add everything, add 50% for writing the tests (either before or after the actual code, that doesn't matter), add another 50% for meetings, discussions, etc., add another 15% for writing documentation and then double it all.

I will never take a fixed-price job, unless I'm sure the client is reasonable in his expectations and I can apply the above calculation while still ending up with a decent hourly rate. I'm currently employed, but my employer isn't doing too well...
Why You Should Register Your Name and Variations On Twitter (Hilarious)
Stop reading at "the first startup since Google..."
"President Obama says that one healthy consequence of the financial crisis will be that college grads with math skills won’t automatically want to become derivatives traders. "We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design", said Obama."

I look at my friends who became computer & chip designers. In their early 30s, after 10 years of hard, hard work in the unforgiving hi-tech industry, they are mostly bitter and burnt-out. Technology moves so fast that their skills will soon be quasi-obsolete. They're thinking of embarking on a new career. It's so depressing that some are even considering selling out and getting a stupid MBA...

I look at my friend who became traders. Their work is not the most intellectually stimulating ever, but they can enjoy many weekends, they have amassed enough loot that they can take a couple of years off and learn some new skills. They seem happier than my engineer friends. They go to nicer restaurants, "sleep" with hotter women. They surely won't make billions of dollars in some mega-IPO, but they will (on average) live more comfortable lives than my engineer friends.

OK, this is just an observation and I won't extrapolate any "universal laws" from this small sample of individuals. Truth be told, the world is run by jackasses. Stop trying to fight it. Unless the incentives change dramatically, smart kids will keep going into finance over engineering. For each, his own...
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If you bartend at River Gods or the B-Side you'll have no excuse for not being booked for dates.

It's pretty easy to be social in Cambridge. There's tons of bars, clubs, meetups and so forth. Out of curiosity, where is "downtown" Cambridge? Central Square?
A facebook browser? Really? Are people really that anxious to return to the days of AOL-style branded internet? I think the recent diggbar fiasco proves otherwise.

I also highly doubt that there are many people anxious to see firefox integrate social networking features. That's the last thing I want them to do, personally. Browsers are platforms. A browser should RUN facebook, not BE facebook. When you try and build software directly into the platform, the results are not pretty. (IE anyone?)
I never even considered the possibility of Facebook building a browser. Thus enlightened, i do believe it is possible...
If you honestly understand how the internet works, _and_ are concerned about password security, how can you NOT be using a different password on every site? (or at least a throwaway password for accounts you don't care about)

EDIT: I guess the biggest reason would be that you likely haven't discovered the awesomeness that is 1Password yet. http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password . There are probably free alternatives. (EDIT Again: Mac only. There are Windows alternatives too :) )
I think the main concern is not that someone can use your account here at HN but the fact that they can get the password file and use your password to access your personal emails and whatever else (assuming that your using the same password, which some people do)
There once was a browser called Netscape 4? Remember what happened to it?

I think Firefox could be better off as an application platform. Let the users decide what they want, make it easy to get and keep the browser slim.
and how many techies make a ton of money in that same mega-IPO? Being a techie/entrepreneur is no guarantee of $$
The End of Personal Finance: Decades of advice turn out to be so much garbage.
Viral marketing idea for old retail establishment:

$1000 product giveaway for someone who can send in a copy of the oldest receipt.
I charge $85/hr for iPhone, web and sysadmin type work. It's not the highest and I'm good so I'm never out of work. If you're a student something like $50 is probably fine. I mean, it's like 7 times as much as what your fellow students doing work-study are making. Ages ago I made $25/hr programming perl as a student and lived like a king. It's largely about context but don't sell yourself short.
Definitely some fluff in the article, but I think his point is simply: "RSS is too slow".

I think this is solvable. One option:

http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com
Primary email account is a loss though...

Think password resets for pretty much every other account of yours. Whether that is HN, Your Registrar, amazon or your bank. I never used to care about my web based email account - but now it's a big deal.
Anybody else notice the contradiction here?

The idea was to try to lure some of the talented software engineers who had been laid off on Wall Street

It turns out that the learning curve was too steep for many financial engineers

How talented can they be?
Oh come on now. We're hackers. That means some SHA1 with a little bit of salt does nothing for "Real Security".

"Real Security" would require personal acquaintance with an operator or someone they have trusted. To go down that trust chain, they would sign your GPG key. After that, posting by signing would be only done. And as per due course, you would be expected to have a HN_only GPG key for 'security reasons'.

But security for securitys sake is just wasting resources when it's just a news site, unless you're a crypto-fiend.
"assuming that your using the same password, which some people do"

This is the key. You're an idiot if your Hacker News password is the same as that of your email.
I did, and he didn't.

I think Crawford has two problems:

1. He's not a good storyteller.

2. Stories you tell using a computer need to be rule-based if the computation is expected to have a (controlled/authored) effect on the story's meaning (i.e. if the computer acts as more than a "projector").

What I find ironic is that he ended up making "Balance of Power - 21st Century" [1], posted lots of progress reports to his forums detailing all his experiments with numerical calculations to affect the play state, and then the finished game was all about voting for or against countries and tallying up. No storytelling to speak of, no characters you'd care about whatsoever. I believe that Crawford is an obsessed man who tragically misunderstood what a story is.

[1] http://storytron.com/play-bop2k.php
Besides of this course from MIT and the one at Stanford (http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php), what other sources are you using to get into iphone development?
I do graphics and entertainment stuff, so this has been interesting: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/

also the Apress books about iPhone development and objective C have been the best books I've seen.

I haven't seen any other online courses I've liked other than the stanford one.
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Hashing passwords doesn't add any real security when the server is compromised, the attacker can just take the entire database.

For a news site accounts are used for identification and not for protection of goods or information so it doesn't matter that much anyway. If the admin of the site finds out that the system is compromised, it's pretty easy to just reset all passwords.
That was the point I was trying to make ;-) There are a few techies who made piles of money, but most have failed, are failing and will keep on failing. The odds of making billions in a mega-IPO aren't much better than winning the lottery, LOL.
Business plan:

1. Create a good product and a company.
2. Sell the company for 1 billion. (Profit!)
3. Whine about how the new owner is bad and leave it.
4. Start a NewAndBetterMySQL company.
5. ???
6. Profit?

Now seriously. If there will happen a confrontation between "Oracle MySQL" and "OpenSource MySQL", I see two possible outcomes:

1. Noone will pay 1 billion for NewAndBetterMySQL next time.

2. The confusion between different versions of the database may mean, that the "OpenSource MySQL" will lose the enterprise market for some time.
Quoting from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590750
where it was posted two days ago:

> alanthonyc
> Linkbait title, lots of empty facts, no meaningful
> conclusions...skip this one.

See there for more. (although not much more)
Missing the point about suggested searches
Well... since when are financial engineers supposed to be good software developers? Even if you're mega-smart, it's virtually impossible to be an expert in pricing derivatives and, simultaneously, an expert in writing code. Some quants were good at coding before they became quants, but as soon as you has some minions hacking for you, your coding skills deteriorate amazingly fast.
The Haskell Platform: a single, standard Haskell distribution for every system
Yes. If not escaped grep will consider the syntax as literals and search for them. Being escaped makes grep treat them as syntactic elements of the regular expression, not characters to match.

For example, "te(s|x)t" will match neither "test" nor "text", but will match anything that has "te(s|x)t" in it. On the other hand, "te\(s\|x\)t" will match any line with "test" or "text" in it.
His initial premise, that laid-off wall streeters would flock to startups, was flawed in many ways.

- the tech stack on wall street is totally different than most startups. On Wall Street it's Windows, Solaris, C++ and EXCEL. At most startups, its uh... not those things.

- most startups don't actually need statistical heavyweights. the whole "analytics" thing he is talking about is a small part of MOST startups. that kind of thing is bigger at google and paypal and after the startup is already successful and has millions of users per hour.

- the actually programmers on wall street are the last ones to get fired

- the financial risk situation is wildly different. on wall street it's $150K base + bonus. at a startup it's $60-$80K + worthless equity. To most wall streeters it's worth waiting around an extra 9 months to see if they can get another $150K job.

- the startups in NYC largely suck, anyway. it's not like actual startup programmers are flocking to them, either.
If the attacker wanted my password that bad, they would be at my house and I wouldn't be on HackerNews.
I think the president was not quite aware of the words "computer design" meant. He may have just meant software or something else.

But I see what you mean and the software side is somewhat similar.
The value of professional copyediting
Most of the quants have to code themselves. Some of them have PhD/MS from the best CS departments. Very few of them have an army of "minions hacking for [them]".

That doesn't automatically mean they develop superior sofftware development skills, but I think your comment misrepresents the reality.
Fortunately there will then be a huge demand, and hence a large reward, for people to invest time into learning it once more.
I can see what you mean. I lived in the same town for the first couple of decades of my life. It's satisfying to know people in the town and point out who owns what building because I polished jewelry for him at his store in high school or which restaurant real estate is cursed because I've seen a dozen places go in and out since middle school.

But moving to a new town can teach you how to insinuate yourself along with a certain community (business perhaps) in a new town and know what the score is by making new connections.
I posted this a while back, but it didn't get many votes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243270
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there are a series of videos of him speaking available at the internet archive: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=fravia
Hey everybody, thanks for all the great feedback so far!

I just wanted to reply to the issues brought up so far.. I'm sorry about the $1.10 charge! We didn't think that'd actually show up on your statement because we only do an auth (not a capture), and then void it right away! Nevertheless, it's been changed to only be $0.01 now!

rsayers, your email bounced back to us because our server name sending the email wasn't fully qualified. we'll get that fixed up and re-send you that email!

We'll also fix up the billing page to correctly reflect the free beta status! Plus allow you to remove your credit card info.

We'll add more documentation/screenshots of the management page/faq-type stuff as soon as possible!

I believe we've fixed up the signup error a few people got now too!

Thanks again for trying it out and please let us know any other questions, comments, or requests you have! And please tell a friend!

Thanks,
Joe Jones
Awesome stats collector for PHP
Detecting Spam on Twitter
since when are financial engineers supposed to be good software developers

The context makes it clear that he's talking about the same people.
May $DEITY present Fravia with all the bounties $AFTERLIFE may offer him. You will be missed.
That's a great point about being _employed_ as an engineer, but the reality you describe is more tied to their 'mode' of work (ie, an employee at a certain type of company) than to the field itself.

There are horrible programming gigs out there, but there are also ways to achieve a happy career working in technology. Startups, independent work, searching hard for a good employer, and so on.

I have been happy as an indie developer for a few years. I bill hourly so overtime is not a big deal, I have flexible hours, work from home, meet my clients for beer, etc. I think it compares favorably to most finance jobs. The income is a fair bit higher than most salaried positions, though I'm sure some finance gigs pay much more.

Maybe one day I'll be in the soup line or in Dilbert hell, but so far it's been a great ride.
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That's a much more sensible explanation than the article gives. My point was more superficial: the statements I quoted are contradictory, or at least oxymoronic, because software talent is largely the ability to go through learning curves.
You are right. I know some quants who have a couple of younger coders to help them with the implementation, but most of them have to code stuff on their own. Sometimes it's "quantish" code like numerical PDEs and SDEs (which is what quants should be doing), other times one has to create GUI's and such stuff which an enthusiastic teenager is more qualified to do than a PhD...
I was referring to this statement: "Well, the script could be slow as dirt, but if it has a few extra weeks to churn through data and produce results, it may be done before the C program is even ready."

The comparison of development times and running times simply makes no sense if you assume the script is going to run a 1000 times. I agree that this relationship isn't linear. That's exactly why it's pointless to compare the the two numbers as if it were. The only number that is comparable is probably the profit you make in each case.
But that isn't nothing. For instance in the case of the reddit lost laptop incident, the information isn't immediately available to anyone who knows how to read a database dump. It has to decrypted which isn't a widely available skill and isn't instanteous even though its tractable.
But he's talking about hosting, not staging. And what you are describing is a good use of EC2. Hosting 24/7 is not.
There are many ways of making a living as a techie. Working for certain kinds of companies is a sure way of being miserable, that is for sure. Going the other way and trying to become the next Gates / Bezos / Brin, etc is another way of being miserable because the odds are ridiculously slim.

However, the area of chip design seems particularly unforgiving. I have seen people burning out very rapidly. Reminds me of that book "The Soul of a New Machine" -- you give your all when you're young, and then you find something else to do with what's left of your life...
Makes me happy. Not because I need it to suggest torrents for me, but it makes me feel like I'm talking to something unbiased, except where indicated. (Of course, that could be a clever ruse...)

I must say though, I'm increasingly irritated at Google's overly 'helpful' suggest in other ways. They've gone too far in the "auto" direction. When I'm searching for technical things (like, all day while programming) the stemming and word substitution can be irritating. I find myself longing for the days when they told you "AND was unnecessary" because they always make sure all terms are in the page. Doing +a +b +"blah" is a bit tedious.
Following up on that...

I'd like an intelligent RSS reader that aggregated information from various social sites to tell me which posts are worth reading, preferably normalized based on the number of readers, so I don't get a zillion Engadget posts and zero niche blogs.

The data could come from links from my friends on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc (after following shortened URL redirects, of course. sigh), top posts on social news sites I read (namely Hacker News and the various sub-Reddits I'm subscribed to), etc.

It would cross-reference all that data with the RSS feeds I'm actually subscribed to, and present me with ranked list of unread articles, so I can read through the best articles first, and ignore the rest if I don't have time.

Separately it could suggest a few other articles on sites I'm not subscribed to, but might be interested in, also based on all of the above data.

Ideally it would be be "passive", not requiring manual interaction to "train" it, other than looking at my subscribed feeds. If there were some more advanced "learning" aspect to it, it could heavily weight my own actions on social sites, i.e. voting up articles on social news sites, linking to articles, etc.
One of them has a story, the other doesn't. People care deeply about stories.
I'm not sure why, but it seems like the jobs closer to the metal burn people out quickly. I know maybe a dozen people who worked in chip design and compiler design and by the time they were mid 30s, none of them were doing it anymore. Most of them are now in occupations unrelated to any sort of programming. Three of them did ok, financially, so they are pretty happy. The rest are quite bitter.
Also, you are wrong. You can do that on slicehost with their API as well.

In fact, with the slicehost api, you can take a snapshot of currently running system, and clone a new slice from that snapshot.
You can do it with Slicehost's API.

http://articles.slicehost.com/assets/2008/10/3/Slicehost_API...
Rainbow tables require script-kiddie levels of expertise.

i.e. basically none.
They are indeed contradictory statements. In this case, I think he's simply wrong. I've met many startup founders in silicon valley who had worked at places like morgan stanley and goldman sachs. Fred Wilson's just upset that they aren't working at HIS startups. And why would they? The pay is bad (compared to wall street, or even working at google), the startups are dumb and there's not even much theoretical upside.
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I bought 1Password as part of one of those Mac software bundles, but still haven't figured out how it's any better than Safari + Keychain's built in password manager. Can someone please explain it to me?
Phusion Passenger 2.2.2 Released
I'm relatively confident that the potential uncovering of some news site password doesn't matter for this demographic. This is hacker news, after all :)
It was meant as a way of pointing out how you should do password security. I picked on pg just to enrage people on this site. Password security isn't hard but even the gods get it wrong sometimes.

Pity no one has pointed out that HN logins are not encrypted.
Drop ACID and Think About Data - The end of good old RDBS?
This line from your ad sends the wrong message I think.

"This is a startup company, and the development is funded out of the founders pockets - we don't have a cash budget for graphic design."

Having the funding for one part of the project, but asking someone to do the other as "pay you forward" says to me that you value developers more than designers...
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certainly not, but a bad name can restrict success.
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@semanticvoid pointed out that one of the problems with using @spam to collect spam for research is that some classes of spammers may be underreported. What is there was an account that just copy tweets from famous accounts or a feed and inserted malware links once a day?

Any ideas on how to improve my data/experiment?
That would just give clueless analyst types more time and companies to write their "$X must buy Twitter" linkbait stories about, I think.
Children and the Economy
Django salts my hashes. It is one of the many virtues of working with a mature framework.