skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
latest claims on #linode by HTP
http://pastebin.com/7WXRDyAg
The Evolution of LED Backlights
They have to build out a real world portfolio to be able to get clients on their own... and that will be created through real experience, not just school work. So, being an intern makes sense, but they should make a living wage.
> The vast vast majority of interesting technical work is done in large organizations

So is the vast majority of boring technical work.
Debugging With Chrome's Canvas Inspection
I disagree. First, it's hard to find good developers, period. S

econd, in general, good developers are hard to find by design (e.g., to avoid recruiters, but also because they are most tof the time already doing interesting work).

Lastly, yes, it's hard to find good Perl programmers to do boring work, under boring conditions, at a boring wage. But then that's true of all good developers. Try to find a Rails programmer to remediate crappy code (I've tried).
Bullies Hurt Themselves
>The notion that negative feedback ought somehow only be posted in event of egregious misdescription is a bizarre, Ebay-centric one.

When you keep in mind the effect bad feedback has on a seller, you really should stay your hand unless you feel they were really out to screw you (or you're just plain vindictive).

It's a buck in shipping. I'd pay it, blast them an email asking WTF, maybe leave a neutral at worst. Bad feedback is reserved for fraud, IMHO.

Then again, the seller in this case appears to be a litigious asshat, so fire away.
Whether it's a valid reason for making an account; the amount of frustration I'm feeling while reading this is a surprisingly new high, given other recent events.
I really find myself questioning how much impact any amount of fighting any one person might do in terms of contacting representatives, sending out emails (normal people sort of things) when confronted by a government that clearly does not share ideals of transparency and limited powers.

(as a postscript, please don't take this as an intention to start a circlejerk; I'd honestly want to hear from anyone who has managed to feel anything other than completely neutered as far as having control over the political processes, this is something that weighs in my mind a lot, enough to risk getting torn apart by HN by posting)
Hopefully it won't be as hot as last year - felt like going home after the first day in Florence.
"People don't react to terrorism because they're afraid of being blown up personally."

I would disagree. My experience is that people view dying in a terrorist act as an especially horrific way to die and hence especially scary. I have had this specific conversation with people where they say it would be much worse to die in a terrorist attack than to die in a car accident.

To me it doesn't make sense. They both kill you but a lot of people see it differently.
Myself as well. On the other hand, I'd wait to see how the Two Guys from Andromeda [1] fare before having hopes of something like this. They appear to have missed their February delivery.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spaceventure/two-guys-sp...
Paying (for A-List) is entirely optional and gets you extra, nonessential features (like no ads and extra search parameters). It's been around since 2009, long before IAC bought us. Using OkCupid is still, and will stay, free.
Vincent: A Python to Vega.js translator
> I don't think that censorship is the right word. But for every time you write about FGM, find a story about an inspiring African grandmother and write about that as well.

Oh, give me a break! Try writing posting that bullshit the next time someone writes about American corruption.

FYI: I'm a bleeding-heart liberal.
Five Must-Haves for Startup Salespeople
What worries me is that most competent people in the industry still ask whether passwords were salted and hashed, rather than whether they used a key derivation function.

Maybe because even that weak protection is still rare. It is the equivalent of "Did you plug it" in tech support.
read "Boston Massacre" memorial plate. The wording is interesting (at least for a foreigner).
Thanks for the explanation. I worked for a one of the eleven companies that still had rights to access the Firehose after the debacle and I saw a lot of great projects stymied by the new rules.
Learnt, Built & Deployed a Scala app in 24 days.
Qué es la solución Dubalu?
That makes me wonder why the credit card system is so insecure in the first place. Why are credit card systems not secured with a password that the merchant never gets to see? Yet at the same time credit card suppliers keep bragging about how "secure" their cards are.
Prototyping Facebook Home with Quartz Composer
One of the cardinal rules of software development is to ask your market what their pain points are, but come up with the solutions on your own. That's because your users understand their problems, but they aren't aware of the different ways you can solve those problems.

For lack of a better word, I'm going to call this the over-association fallacy. The over-association fallacy is when you think "I must have X, Y is one way to get X, therefore I must have Y."

This post is a classical example of the over-association fallacy. What the author really wants is the freedom to experiment, and he concludes that you can't have this in a big company.

However, there are plenty of big companies that give you that freedom, and plenty of small companies that don't. The smallest company I ever worked for had 4 people, but the CEO was an extreme micromanager who layered huge amounts of work on his employees and was terrified of innovation. In contrast, I had a huge amount of freedom to play around at a giant bank, because I automated all my work and my manager only cared about the quality of work (not how many hours I spent.) The result of this playing around helped me learn a lot and save the company millions of dollars.

So keep in mind what you really want. Don't avoid big companies, avoid places that don't let you learn anything.
What can we do? Look for the helpers inside of us
Facebook Charging $1 Million For New, Intrusive Video Ads
"People downplay the magnitude of 9/11, but as I noted somewhere else today, it involved more deaths than Pearl Harbor"

that's one point of reference.

Here a different point of reference. It involved about 1/10 the number of annual automobile accident deaths.
Your blog looks like it's owned by Twitter. The twitter logo is in the usual location of the owner's logo. I suggest you repair this. Among other things, it's probably against their policy.

Also, I had exactly the same experience, but the difference here is the enterprise nature of the startup. Enterprise demands power, and investment, and capital. You can't do it lean.
Exactly this. Holding your head high is not a response to terrorism.
>I can already see the glee in intelligence / law enforcement agencys' eyes as they think how they can use this latest incident as reasoning for more over-arching powers.

I think this is my biggest concern.

Once in a while at the Back Bay subway/commuter rail/Amtrak station you will occasionally see Boston Police officers - sometimes accompanied by TSA agents - set up at the station, some of which are carrying submachine guns (MP5s). We're not talking one or two officers, but somewhere between half a dozen and a a dozen, several of which have the automatic weaponry at the ready.

On two occasions, I've asked one of the officers, "Hey, what's going on?". In one case it was simply a training exercise. In another, they were looking for a "person of interest".

In general, I don't want to be at a transit station trying to get home on the subway where there is a situation in which the officers feel the use of that kind of force is necessary, especially considering the fact that I can't recall a single situation in the time I've lived here where the use of submachine guns would've ever been justified.
I don't feel sorry for Flattr. The creator, Peter Sunde, one of the creators of The Pirate Bay, not only facilitates the sharing of content against the wishes of many of the owners, but charges 10% to use Flattr.

If Flattr was really all about helping others, the fee would be much less.

I still remember when he spoke at a conference and he talked about how everything should be shared/free. It seems he's not being very honest with us.

With the amount of advertising on TPB (and traffic), I know he was making a profit (and paying his salary).

Why should he get to profit on the backs of hard-working developers and musicians and at the same time saying they shouldn't be able to earn a living?
I supported Double Fine Adventure on Kickstarter and lot of the last points of the OP refer to how Tim Schafer is managing it.

But, in this case, if Ron Gilbert is making a proof of concept with this post, a MVP to check if Monkey Island 3a can be crowdfunded - or even if it is just a critique of Double Fine Adventure campaign, I am on Tim Schafer's side here.

Crowdfunding is not about "give me the money and trust me". The crowd is not a substitute for publisher's money or even a maecenas. He wants to win the lotto and create a game, not receive the support of the crowd (and all that come from it).

I love the documentary updates, the forums, to understand what happens behind the scenes. This is not about keeping the hype up, this is about sharing the world of creating games with the people that supported it.
Cleaner fish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaner_fish sometimes become food when they're no longer wanted.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4062216
Isn't it just modifying the disclosure aspects(you're still supposed to disclose, but it removes the obligation to have a searchable online database of the records. The records are still there, but in more of a highway-going-through-Arthur-Dent's-hosue sense)
Typewriter That Never Forgets - Chrome Extension
Applied Cryptography is a terrible reference. Please don't recommend it to programmers. Instead, recommend Practical Cryptography / Cryptography Engineering (they're the same book), which Schneier co-authored with Niels Fergusen.

Update: I said "terrible book" but I'm going to start being more precise about this. It's not a terrible "book"; I enjoyed the hell out of it when I was a teenager. It's just misleading and dangerous.
The troubles with storing—and sharing—the Universe and our DNA
Yeah, they should do more of that "critical thinking" where you deliberately mischaracterise an entire ideology and dismiss concepts out of hand.

You realise that the theory of patriarchy has been extensively discussed and refined throughout the years. More 'critical thinking' has gone into it than you could even dream of. I am willing to wager that you've never even picked up a book about it, let alone read one. So, explain to us your theories of 'critical thinking'...
Break-in at Vudu
This "No news"/"News is bad for you" fad needs to end. New is not bad for you. News is good for you. Knowing what's going on your world and the world is important.

What isn't good for you is getting sucked into the manufactured drama and drawn out 24 hour news cycle.

The correct attitude would be something more like "be an intelligent consumer of news" rather than "news is bad, stick your head in the sand and ignore it". If you understand that news is entertainment then that's just about all you need to know to be able to pick out the relevent information and go about your day. The news media may do a lot of terrible things but journalists themselves still exist and are still ethical. It's just that they're beholden to their bosses who turn their reporting into something other than a report of the facts.

News is not bad for you. The inability to think critically about what you see on the news is bad for you.
You're missing my point, PHP developers that know how to build websites are available ten to the dozen. But Perl most of the Perl developers we've tried to recruit over the last 18 months are either completely clueless at writing RESTful APIs or just terrible developers (sometimes even both).

We've had far more success at hiring good PHP developers and teaching them Perl then we have had at finding the Perl developers that can write web technologies.

But this might just be a facet of our location (a suburb that's more than an hour away from any city), so all the developers of "niche" languages (such as Perl has sadly become) tend to get drawn to the city and higher wages. Where as those who are still good developers but not as money driven tend to pick the more popular languages because they'll pick the work in the area they want to work. (that's probably an unfair generalization statement, but it's true for the local area where I live).
You make good points, I certainly wouldn't extend this to America, or even other parts of Europe.

It is true that a lot of London money is made in finance, but we also have some giant engineering companies and subsidiaries, such as Rolls Royce, BAE. Sony, Huawei, IBM, Siemens, and others have large research presences in the suburbs, because engineers are cheaper here than in America, but we have more aggressive IP laws than China or India.

If you want a big company to get lost in as an engineer or project manager, there is no lack of them.

Working at a startup, hoping for an IPO, is a high risk high reward gamble. People choose to do it because it gives them agency over their work and futures in a way that being part of a big machine does not, but most fail, and we should be aware when we take a risk what that risk is, hence my post.

Taking advantage of London's competitive advantage in finance, a lot of financial startups have won really big, setting up major energy trading exchanges and brokerages, though you wouldn't hear of them outside the industry.

I'm more cynical about the current wave of London web startups.

Would I suggest a young Londoner goes to work at a startup? This city has a bit of an unpaid internships culture, and I fear they would get the same experience as at a larger company, for less CV impact and no money. Get into computer security at KPMG, you'll get rich.
Password protection is like vaccination. Herd immunity is as valuable asset as individual.

Since the majority of people still have the security setup of "one or two emails for most of the things and a set of 2-3 close passwords"

The moment you have a leak of 200 000 000 email password pairs the whole industry is in trouble not only the site that leaked them.

Currently there is semi random brute forcing - just taking already cracked lists and mutating them to guess the password.
I'm fine with this. Instead of a gold-rush, maybe people will only build things of value since they won't be motivated only by a pot of gold.

Anyone remember how bad many of the first iOS games were, because companies were clearly just shoveling together stuff in hopes of making bucketloads of cash? Actually, this is still what most iOS games are...

I personally still want to make software for it. At no point in my mind was I thinking about ads I could display or the money I could make. I just want to make software that assists me while I'm motorcycling. Looking to integrate that with an enhanced datalogger I'm building for my bikes that will just relay information via the REST api.
Does anyone have a clear view of Twitter's Terms on commercial use and can clarify it?

For example, Flattr and Ribbon.co have recently run into trouble, but Chirpify, Amex and Dwolla look like they might have Twitter's blessing.

Can anyone give a good explanation of how it works?
You are speaking with a sense of entitlement which is vain. Backward castes and Dalits constitute 75% of the population of India. So if the electorate decided they need affirmative action as even after 60 years of independence, their representation remains below 20% in white collar jobs, then it is their prerogative. Since when do the minority dictate terms to a majority in a democratic polity. Grow up dude, and be thankful that you still have 50% seats in general category and that is given to you by the will of the majority.
Python Brochure Project Preview
slight tangent : as a developer with little background in security, can someone help me understand the role of security specific distros in real world pen testing?

In other words, what are some specific draws to using pre-rolled distros like Backtrack or Kali instead of configuring a standard Linux distro with the necessary tools? I would be much more inclined to tweak my Arch (or whatever) image rather than futz around inside a new environment.
You're not the target market for those types of PDF's then. In large corporate environments, PDF's are roughly the equivalent of small web-apps that handle a lot of the data entry and sharing across the organization.

I'm not a proponent of this approach, but it is what it is and it is the reason that Reader is such a bloated security-ridden nightmare.
Sure. I'm certain that there are competent developers who are aware of KDFs but still ask for salting for the reason you described.

The problem I perceive is that other developers learn from this question. They falsely learn that salting is the best practice answer, when it is not.
I didn't read that much of a value judgement into it. It seems more like he's just managing expectations by explaining that he wouldn't do it that way.
The median US household income is something like $50k/year. Probably lower in Michigan, but we'll call it $50k. Michigan has a 4.25% income tax, so eliminating that would be a savings of $2,125. But you have to pay federal tax on that. Let's just say you're paying 15%. So now we're talking a savings of about $1,800. $1,800/year isn't chump change, but it's also not a life altering amount of money. For me personally, it's nowhere near enough money to put up with all the negatives that come with Detroit.
I think it's interesting when people tie sentiment to coding choices. As previously stated, I could never wrap my head around the horrid syntax and the feeling that if you didn't know it from the beginning it was going to be a long, hard trek in doing so.

As for 'cool' I'm not so sure. Perl will be a niche sandbox for quite a while, but most run-ins with Perl (as of late) have been trying to remove it for something else. I think choosing a more accepted language has legs for a variety of reasons including code portability and long-term maintainability, both stemming from the fact that if there's only one guy maintaining all of the Perl code then that's a very-bad-thing.

But, that's just me. To wax nostalgic on Perl and use that as a basis for use-case seems, at least somewhat, reckless.
The aren't excused from the value of the debt. They are returning the collateral, which closes out the debt.

The whole price of the loan (interest rate, points, etc...) was based upon the home being the only recoverable asset in the case of default.

This is why most loans with less than 20% equity have to pay primary mortgage insurance. If your house declines in value, you probably have an agreement that PMI kicks it. The lender being the beneficiary if the PMI has to pay off.

Theoretically this both protects the borrower from predatory practices and encourages the lender to make quality loans.
"Despite the uselessness of these hashes, as you know we expired Linode Manager passwords on Friday."

The uselessness of hashed passwords depends entirely on the hashing algorithm and the strength of the password.
I've created a community and learning platform for math, physics and CS lovers
Every time I think congressional officials can't get more arrogant, they surprise me again.

The headline is a bit off though - according to the article only the disclosure portion of the law was repealed - though IMHO this is the most important part of the law. The argument stated that the disclosure required could open individuals to identity theft and creates a potential security risk. This may actually be true. But by not bring it up for debate and talking about it in public, all it will do is make people suspicious. I may be interpreting the changes [1] in correctly, however it sounds like it will still be recorded in a database, albeit one that is not publicly accessible.

[1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c113:3:./temp/~c113rT6...:
The Great Sensor-Era: Brontobytes will change Society
Didn't the Dems have both houses of Congress for the first two years? Unless the "entrenched party, backed up by the ultra-rich" you're talking about is the Democratic party (I would argue that it is both).
I have tried teaching programming and here are some things I would suggest other than the usual stuff:

- Do not assume that just because you think a topic is simple, it will be simple for your student to understand. Remember you have done this thing many times over the years. So now it seems trivial to you but probably not to your student who has never done it before. So be patient and go slow.

- Everyone learns differently. Figure out what works for that specific student and use it to your advantage. If you user is a writer who wants to learn how to program, try and use some references to writing if you can when explaining a concept.

- Focus on the negative cases. Teach a specific concept (say pointers in C or vector in Java) not just by showing an example program that works. Teach it by breaking the program and showing how the compiler/interpreter etc. behaves when something does not work the right way.

- Try and use pictures/diagrams to illustrate a concept if necessary. For example, pointers can really be explained well if described in pictures where you show the address, the value etc. and how they are related. For example, when you say int * p, what really happens.

- Teach them how to "design" a program for larger programs. For example, I was taught to use nouns and verbs where nouns usually become class. Something like that. But knowing how to design an app is very important in my opinion.
Lots of good points, thanks. Signing up for a block of hours is a good idea, I hadn't thought of that.
This seems like it'd usually be true, but what about Hacker News comments that are more insightful than the original article?
Frivolous like posting a 1 star rating because the seller required you to pay $1.44 in shipping to complete the transaction? I'm not sure it's the lawsuit that's frivolous.
Why weren’t the hard drives encrypted? This should at the very least protect against a physical one-off attack such as this one.
Fair enough. I agree it can be funny, just somewhat immature. The line between bullying and "self referential in-group humor" is pretty thin sometimes. I guess it's a bit like sexist jokes, in that some things that are meant as funny can be interpreted wrongly and hurt.
The people we're leaving behind
"The diversity of Ann Arbor"? The goalposts have fallen somewhere weird here. I don't particularly like San Francisco, but Ann Arbor is basically Noe Valley transplanted into central Michigan; that is, it's got the diversity and culture of one neighborhood of a real city.

Redmond must suck a lot.
The seller made sure that there would be no winners in this situation when they sent the item with insufficient postage. If that doesn't happen, the rest of this likely does not happen.

"Negging someone on eBay for a buck in shipping is a pretty crappy thing to do"

That's just not true - that may be your opinion but that's the opinion of a very small number of people. The majority - an overwhelming majority - believe that it one valuable part of such community feedback systems to provide a way for buyers to notify other perspective buyers of potential problems.
ruby: 54,385 packages / 18 years = 3022 packages per year

Gems / rubygems haven't been around 18 years. The first public release was in 2004. So 9 years or 6042 packages per year is probably more realistic.