skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BTSync won't be a Dropbox killer until it has unlimited version history.
The attack has nothing to do with hash collisions; it has to do with the fact that the MD-structured hashes spit out their entire state at the end of the operation, which means an attacker can simply reformat the hash back into the hash core's state and continue hashing with it.
Yes, sorry for deleting a comment when there was a reply! For posterity, it was something like: "it seems like you would need to break MD5 in order to do this, because you'd have to update the length."
But Hacker Community is the one that guides others towards new technologies. 10 years from now, Octopress may be prime blogging platform or second best!
When you put a file into a Dropbox-synced folder/directory, Dropbox first syncs the file to their cloud storage in AWS. Once that sync is completed, Dropbox starts to sync to other devices. If you want to sync a large file, you must wait for the cloud sync to complete before it will start to copy it to other devices, which could take longer than copying with a flash drive.

I assumed that was the meaning behind the statement you selected.
When you undo the C and C++ merger, how does the list look? They are very different languages, in particularly in that they attract very different people, so it is interesting to know which is actually being used rather than "C/C++".
The hard thing is "keeping your skills current".

Once you have been in a job for a while it can be easy to stagnate because you end up spending most of your work time maintaining something that was written in ASP.Net or PHP4 or whatever and it doesn't make business sense to do a rewrite in something newer.

The alternatives are to job hop or to work somewhere that is constantly using or evaluating new tech. Or to spend your own time learning new skills , which you may have less of when you are older.

There's also the issue of deciding what to learn, since you can't realistically learn everything.

I've been burned in the past by spending time looking into various technologies that have never really gone anywhere. It's hard to make a bet like "Will I be more employable in 10 years time by learning node.js or go?"
I thought when they hired Eric Brewer as VP of Infrastructure it was for his general CAP and high-scalability expertise. Maybe they hired him for his experience bringing wireless internet to developing nations / the third world...or both!

http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/
Haxe is pretty cool from a language standpoint. It’s certainly an improvement in some areas on its closest relative, ActionScript 3. Particularly “enums”[1] (ADTs) are excellent to have, as I’ve been spoiled by them in Haskell, as well as proper generics, “switch” as an expression, and other such goodies. Bit of a shame that they kept the fat old “function” keyword, though. The type inference system is also a bit lacking—I don’t like how it can depend on control-flow order whether you get a type error or not[2].

I recall that the compiler would often produce different behaviour on different backends, including crashes. Presumably this has been addressed in recent versions? It’s one of the reasons we chose AS3 when developing Spaceport[3] and stuck to matching Flash behaviour as closely as possible.

[1]: http://haxe.org/ref/enums

[2]: http://haxe.org/ref/type_infer

[3]: http://spaceport.io/
"Engineer" is a fairly vague term. Once you are 60, you have probably "graduated" to a higher-level engineering job that involves more consulting/management/planning and less gruntwork. If you still enjoy the gruntwork aspect (I do, at times), more power to you. Either way, anyone involved in a programming-related job should always keep themselves up to date by getting their hands dirty once in a while.
Was it a random email or directly after signup? Not that it makes it all that much better, but some sites will email the plaintext as a record for the user, though they only store a hashed version.
> other hash functions that are not, like SHA-512/256

I think you meant SHA-224/384. Both SHA-512 and -256 are vulnerable to length extension because their internal state is dumped and resumable. With SHA-224/384, you only get a truncated state (from 256- and 512-bits respectively), which you can't pick up and resume.
I found that to be kind of a mixed bag. I definitely think that to get rid of addiction, you cannot simply take addiction away from a person because you leave a hole that they filled with drugs precisely because they are unable to fill it with anything else (if only at that time in their lifes).

Whether it is a good idea to fill it with some curious mix of African rituals and some even more curious psychedelics is questionable, but I think it's reasonably straightforward why it works. Snap them out of it, bring them into an empathetic community. A lot of approaches go like that. It's probably mostly placebo, but hey, placebo works 20% of the time.
I think the differences stem from two factors:

1) Doctors and lawyers are seen as exercising judgment, while engineers are seen as building things.

2) Training opportunities (in the "learn by doing" sense of "training") for doctors and lawyers are much harder to come by than for engineers. If you're looking for a lawyer who has taken half a dozen big commercial litigations through trial, you're probably looking for someone very old because there just aren't very many of those trials that happen. Same thing if you're looking for a doctor with half a dozen experiences treating a patient with aggressive cancer. But how hard is it to find a young software engineer with half a dozen big websites under his belt?

Now, I don't think either perception is completely true, in the sense that I think people underestimate how much judgment software engineers exercise and overestimate how quickly they can build up valuable experience.
Here is a strategy that I have heard repeated a few times: When you see a rhetorical question in the title of a news article, the answer is no. The answer is always no. The article may say maybe. But the answer is no. Just like that you've saved yourself a few minutes.
There's an article on HN right now about setting up a MacBook for grandma. And everyone talks about how great an iPad has been for the elderly.

I don't think they're stubborn, they're just different. I also don't think they're cheap either, because an iPad (let alone a MacBook) is still a consumer electronic luxury.
You can easily get the Svbtle theme in Wordpress by using wp-svbtle: http://wp-svbtle.themeskult.com/
Andy Baio posted in March 2005 about this: "Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting at least 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages."
source: http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/

Matt acknowledged the issue with this content (cloaked with CSS) and apologized the next month:
http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/
I didn't think so, but I mentioned it because the Wikipedia article on Merkle-Damgård hashes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle–Damgård_construction) talks about length extension attacks only in the context of hash collisions: "Length extension — once an attacker has one collision, he can find more very cheaply."
WordPress is what's being pushed for 100% control by personal bloggers and businesses. Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives, especially for those who aren't tech-savvy.

(I still recommend Tumblr over WordPress if you aren't blogging professionally, though)
> We also tend to recommend that people simply use PGP for data at rest, and TLS for data in motion

When I complain about bad crypto (in API auth in particular) and my clients really really push for me to give them advice, I repeat this line verbatim.

They hate it because TLS with client-side certs for authentication (where you become the CA) is unfamiliar and has too many moving parts for them. They go and develop their hand-rolled API auth, I proceed to shoot holes in it and come across as a bit of dick (to be fair, I'm not hired as a security consultant, just a regular developer).

I can normally get a few developers on board, but have yet to convince a client to use TLS in this way in production.
I think we are reaching the golden age of the older developer. Companies are learning how much more great developers are worth than poor ones. Retention bonuses have gone crazy (getting a 3 year / 250k bonus package isn't even that interesting).

The evergreen underpinnings, the basic knowledge of how to build systems floats through languages and technologies.
Wired should have just posted an abstract sketch, something that says "blimp" but is clearly not pretending to be a "GBlimp".
imho there are only two killers out there btsync & seafile.

- btsync has the ease of use that seafile doens't have

- seafile has optional file versionning that btsync doesn't have
Exactly. Personally, I like playing around with static site generators but when somebody asks me how to start a website (or if I'm setting up a website for a non-technical individual) I almost always refer them to Wordpress.

I think Wordpress's greatest strengths are its ability to handle many users updating the site, personalization through a plethora of freely available themes, and its ability to handle and display many different kinds of content. All of these features are readily available without having to delve into a single line of code.
Man, what a horrible design this site has.
Rate-limited by GitHub.
The world might need more working crypto. The world doesn't need more broken crypto.

Broken crypto isn't just a step on the path to working crypto; it's an opportunity for people to get hurt.

The bet I'm making right now is that if people get a little bit of crypto literacy, they'll stop being so excited about deploying crypto in their applications. Implementing a bunch of crypto attacks has the effect of making you paranoid about cryptography. If generalist developers have one key problem with cryptography, it's that they're not paranoid about it --- in fact, the opposite: when they write crypto features, the crypto makes them feel safer. That's not how the crypto professionals I know feel about cryptography!

I strongly agree: things like NaCl and Keyczar are a great solution to this problem. Take the knobs away from the developers and just give them something that is likely to work, designed conservatively. Unfortunately, NaCl and Keyczar have nothing resembling the popularity of "I found this RSA implementation in Ruby and now I'm going to build an application with it". How do we fix that? I think part of the solution has to be to convince developers they should be more afraid of DIY crypto.

As for security: you should understand that when we write about it, we're writing about a competition. Attackers vs. defenders. Writing about competitions (or, in some of our cases, actively participating in those competitions) does something to the tone of your writing.

The software security field can be annoyingly competitive and status-oriented, too.
Three wrappers to run commands without impacting the rest of the system
It's expected that money is negotiated. Companies that have bands usually have pretty wide bands and then the band you're in is also negotiable. Most companies will have a vacation policy of some sort which is hard to negotiate against.

Vacation is more visible which can make it a problem. This also creates a "negative vacation" problem- people working on weekends, holidays, long hours and during their "vacation".

What would you compare between Germany and the US? Perhaps a more adequate comparison is US salary level vs. vacation days across different companies. Also a very hard/noisy compare.

We should do an HN survey... (I'd be interested in how much vacation people are getting/taking).
It would be nice if it could mark the games that requires the original assets.
That's actually a relatively new finding, and a very cool attack (I assume we're talking about Joux multicollisions).
Or I could just look at the site. One theme sold > 22k copies:

http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-th...

You saying 22k-1 were all changed by service providers? Unlikely.
Almost human: Lab treats trauma with virtual therapy
It's not a problem, it could be added to 'info'. But now all games need to be processed... if you want to help with that, you're very welcome! :)
Point. But I don't think the MPAA and RIAA are after the market of "people who find it more unethical to pirate than they find it inconvenient to consume legally"
Actually don't know if that's true. As a former physician myself, in many circumstances, I would prefer a younger (to a degree) physician to a much older one. Medical knowledge does change relatively quickly and standards of care change a lot.

For the same reason as engineers, it comes down to keeping up with the field. I don't know for a fact that an old physician hasn't kept up with the field, but I do know a younger one can only be so behind.
"""When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that age. Plan accordingly."""

Wait, what I did 40 years ago won't guarantee my employment now?!? What is this insanity, I thought once I got my degree in 1973 I was done with all this "learning" nonsense. How can I be expected to just keep updating my skills?
I think that this article, though terse and generalistic, addresses a valid issue. However, I agree with many posters here in saying that it's not exclusively age that hampers older engineers, but an ossified skillset. Anyone who becomes entrenched in a nichey vocation then strikes out at 50+ to find new employment is going to suffer. The tech world worships youth and forgives hubris and foolishness, so it's especially unfertile ground.

That being said, as a serial startup founder, on a few occasions I've had developers working for me in their late fifties and even sixties. I was, in fact, in my mid to late twenties at the time, and I had great relationships with these guys. They had kept their skills up and their experience enabled them to sometimes do the work of ten people.

In my first company, I had a sixteen year old whiz kid who was possibly the most gifted hacker I've ever worked with, and we later hired a portly, bearded, late-fifties nudist Unix guy who balanced the youngster out quite nicely.

I'm now working in a startup where of the eleven of us, nine of us are in our forties, including three 40-something engineers. I've never worked with a better crew. And our stack is about as cutting-edge as would be responsible in a serious startup. Our VP of engineering literally helped invent Java at Sun, but moved on to new things later on instead of getting stuck.
If I had to guess, Java and/or PHP would be in the top 10 if I disaggregated. There are more C++ players than C players.

These are based on survey results, and the selection I presented was "C/C++", so I'm stuck guessing.
An advert for ads.
I'm not buying it. I'm about to turn 50 - doing better work than ever and more in demand. The tools today are so good compared to 5-10 years ago. Now I have these awesome tools, and understand sales/marketing/management/finance.

ps - could I get a job as a developer? probably not. but there are other (better) alternatives.
> Good riddance.

Probably from cost perspective, but from emotional connect point of view it certainly is a loss[1][2].

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_brencher_love_letters_to_str...

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/lakshmi_pratury_on_letter_writing.h...
Does broadcasting an unwanted wireless internet across a nation's borders count as an act of war? If the US broadcast open Wi-Fi across North Korea's or China's borders, they would be unhappy. Something like Radio Free Europe.
openCaesar3 make me worry. Because if the intent is merely to clone the game, with the same basic mechanics, I am not sure I will enjoy it, despite having spend countless errors on the original, Caesar 3.

Part of the problem - in this case at least - lies in the original game's mechanics, particularly its walker mechanic. If you look up any videos or guides on how to play Caesar 3 well (or rather; best), you'll notice that most of these guides try to abuse the walker mechanic - which in itself doesn't make much sense - to the limit, creating cities that effectively doesn't really look like cities, because they avoid connecting them, inserts gatehouses everywhere, etc.

Sure, this is gamey, you say, but it actually proves a fundamental flaw in the city-building games because of the walker mechanic. If you are to make a clone of Caesar 3, it would be sad to copy this mechanic, but then some would argue that it is no longer Caesar 3, because you'd have to replace it with something else. Something radically different.

Which ends my argument with basic idea; don't clone Caesar 3, make something better.
+1 investing constantly in education and learning new skills is the way to go!

I am 62 and I have been consulting for 15 years so age has not such an issue. Honestly, I can understand why a company might not want to hire an older software engineer but in my experience companies don't mind old consultants.

When asked for advice by people wanting to have a lifestyle (work on your own terms) consulting business, I suggest they, in addition to working, also invest time in writing a lot (blogging, books) and contributing to open source projects.
You mention it takes 8 months in this post, yet in the website it says 8 weeks. Which one is it? It also is an awful short time to learn of the subjects you mention. Copywriting itself takes years to learn properly.
"a throttle measure built in"

It's my understanding that bittorrent sync uses the latency of the network for such a throttle. Wild hair: a cyclotron-style router roundabout could hold millions of packets "in suspension" for n seconds.
It really seems like this is an argument that seeks to make it harder to understand a problem, rather than easier. I'm just not interested in the semantic debate, sorry.
Not saying drawing doesn't help. I am saying you don't tell someone brand new to programming to start with Lisp. You tell them to start with something simple like HTML. There's equivalents in design.
Where's the line between something being "stolen" and something being "inspired" by something else?

People say that as soon as you "copy and paste" a line of code that isn't yours, you're stealing. But it seems that without the "copying and pasting" that is inherent, not only in the learning process, but often in the process of innovation itself, we wouldn't have the products we have today.

And what's the difference between copying and pasting something and creating something similar, but not an exact copy with similar code that you viewed and then re-typed in a similar way? Can one be outright theft and the other be acceptable?
Ashton Kutcher on Seed Stage Startups Equity
This article comes pretty close to plagiarizing the source article it's based on - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732397500457850...
When Being An Entrepeneaur Becomes Being Evil
Most Entrepeneaurs are great people, doing great things that fill their wallet and change the world at the same time. However one type of Entrepeneaur I ran into this week was frankly pure evil.

I'm not going to say his companies name, I'm not going to say his name, or the condition he "helps" parents treat - but I do have this condition myself.

His company gets money from parents hoping to treat their children that have an untreatable neurological difference helping parents keep track of the "supplements" and "treatments" they have their children go through. However all of these "supplements" and "treatments" have been proven by medical science to have no positive effect - and in fact have been tied to the deaths of many patients causing the Food and Drug Administration to issue a warning on the use of these supplements and treatments to treat the condition.

This company basically is cashing out on the false hopes of parents to treat their children. This company helps parents treat their children with "supplements" and "treatments" the FDA has tied to childrens deaths.

Evil.
Simple Linear Regression From R to Python
It's almost like a web 101 test to pass or something.

A proof of some kind of competency with the web stack.
Dear Matt,

Could you please use any font other than Source Sans Pro[1]? It looks terrible on at least one major desktop operating system.[2]

[1] https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro

[2] http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png
Ashton Kutcher on Israel
You're not misreading his posts. They make me sad, too.
> pointers to elements are not stable

This is only a problem if the list is constituted exclusively by its backing store; which is a common implementation for linked lists in some langs/libraries, but rarely for lists backed by arrays. In the latter case, the "list object" typically has a pointer to the backing array, and also other fields like indexes of first/last element in use. This means one extra level of indirection for any use of the list, but in practice compiler optimizations easily hoist or constant-propagate this overhead away in any code where it matters.

> There are a huge number of operations where you don't traverse the list but need to add/remove from the middle

Admittedly, my use of "niche" is context-dependent. In languages like Java where List is a kind of catch-all data structure -- it's the collection that people use when they don't have a very good reason for any other option -- the huge majority of uses do not involve updates in non-tail position (or even any updates after the initial population; most of the time a fixed-size array would work just right... except that it's against modern Java religi, er, style, to ever use its primitive arrays).
yes. it is. people can deny it or choose otherwise or say it's not politically correct, but it's true.
A lot of those games aren't actually quality work. Especially because they tend to settle with out of the box settings instead of having the ability to customise it. Though a good artist can hide it through good artwork and sound.
eh, I foresee my comment from the not so far future:

I learned C++ in 1999 and it still does the job in 2055.
Your upper management is playing with fire if the candidates were over forty (at least in the U.S. -- other countries probably vary). That's just as illegal as turning them down because they happened to be female or black.
Many people know how to draw and still don't know a lick about web/app design. You're recommending a tangent, not a direct path.
Best Place To Start A Company If You Have Kids
What would have happened if you had all done that, though? ;-)
Agree with you about the value of older devs, but I wish I could say I saw "the industry" paying for experience. The examples of ridiculous grants I know about have all gone to people who are in their 20s and early 30s.

Granted, there's some selection bias going on: I don't see many 40-something programmers in SOMA. That said: I don't see many 40-something programmers in SOMA.
> Majority still end up with trouble implementing a simple
> JUnit/Selenium automation test for a login page.

Somehow I doubt the result is different for younger ones.
Super Mario War?
This is not a Forbes article, it is an article by a Forbes "contributor" which is a barely-vetted blogger given permission to publish articles.
How important is your job?