skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It'd be rather more difficult than that to take out a high-altitude blimp with small arms. One hesitates to say impossible, but it's wildly unlikely without organized military involvement.
You mention your grandma learning about Chrome OS and learning about the iPad's OS. Which did she end up using more?

Did she ever have access to both at the same time? If so, which would she choose to google something simple like store hours?
I would love to see something like this that allows you to serve a website on localhost to specific people. The browser control could be embedded so you could control how resources are loaded (through torrent instead of normal URL).
What have some of you more career-advanced HNers done to ensure yourselves employment as you guys age? I'm looking for tips to take into consideration through the years.
Along the lines of of your examples, I would add distributed systems.

Still, cryptography is much, much worse than all these examples for a simple reason: with a sufficient amount of testing for functionality you can convince yourself that you've gotten things like concurrency correct, or at least correct enough that it won't be a problem most of the time. You can't do that with security - instead of testing for functionality you have to test for attack resilience, but whereas you know what functionality to test for, you can't test for attacks you don't know about. Furthermore, you can't be correct merely most of the time - you have to be correct all of the time, because if you slip up just once, your adversary will exploit you.

I really don't think there's any parallel.
Isn't it a bit much to give Berners-Lee credit for this? I was with you up to that point. :)
I'm actually a huge fan of savory oatmeal at anytime of day
Very good point. I would extend it to security in general.

Security is like medicine: do not try it yourself, unless you are a specialist or want to end up dead.

Too bad a lot of developers still do not understand this and remain too self-confident, from what I personally have seen.
The parentheses are used as delimeters so that you can use quotes in the literal.

string test = R"(the Star Trek catchphrase "Beam me up, Scotty" did not appear)";

If you want to use quotes in the string, you can add up to 16 chars to the delimiter, but you still have to use the parentheses.

string test = R"[de=limiter!(the (Star Trek) catchphrase "Beam me up, Scotty" did not appear)[de=limiter!";
They were not stolen from. If you have a thing and I copy the thing, it is not stealing. Copyright infringement, piracy, loss of theoretical sales, perhaps yes.
And then get all ideological about it and iterate back to more broken solutions (Chicago school)

Or, even worse, Keynesianism.
Why are you assuming this is automatically a surveillance tool? It's not a drone with the explicit intent to search for something. It's a way to get Internet to people.
It doesn't suck to be an old engineer. It sucks to be an engineer with outdated skills.

I learned FORTRAN in 1968. I learned Scala in 2012.

I'll be 61 this week...and I just started a new job developing in Scala.
As the architect of the systems, I focus the designs on scalability and performance and the devs implement it. So, whether it's a dev or its an architect, someone has to be thinking about it. But having an ops background helps with knowing how to scale.
A 40 year old degree in anything alone isn't good enough to stay employed in any field. Except maybe teaching.
Use test@example.com

http://www.iana.org/domains/reserved
My own version:

Buy palm oil, raw pork belly, plantains, milk and sugarless chocolate.

Palm oil and pork belly are rich in saturated fat, and they are cheap because of that.

Cut and fry the raw pork belly with a little bit of palm oil, then fry the plantains with the oil that's left.

Make the chocolate with half water-half milk.

Enjoy something really healthy for a keto-style diet. When the currently acknowledged science catches up with keto research, this will not be cheap anymore: remember the shortage of butter in Scandinavia. This food will be really expensive in 15-30 years. Enjoy while it lasts.
This isn't really new, nor is it specific to software engineering. "Line engineers" have always had a very hard time with employment as they age (not that it doesn't happen). The usual ways to avoid this are (in order of risk):

1) Get your MBA and go into management;
2) Start or join a consultancy;
3) Start a company.

My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc) are all in the process of setting themselves up with exit options (we're all just around 30).
Ok , been haxing for 5/6 years.

I think that it is not that popular because , while the language is very powerfull , some aspects of it are very complicated ( Generics , Macros , expressions , ... ) . Especially for beginners.

The docs are a mess , i tried to edit them a few time , but they should change the way it is organised. In my opinion a WIKI is never the proper solution for a doc. 1 person should take care of the docs and centralise every demands, with the help of Github or whatever.

BUT

Adobe is giving up on flash , and HAXE is the only solution that is good enough as a remplacement for flash games , apps ,etc ...

We often say Jobs or HTML5 killed flash , but the truth is Adobe KILLED flash itself. Frankly Adobe should sell Flash , they did an awfull job with it. How many Businesses kill their own succesfull ( 90% install base on desktop ) ?

aside from Borland with Delphi ( the biggest waste in the history of computer languages , Delphi was just awesome ) , only Adobe.
Good for you and happy birthday! May 30th here.
Not the way a naive reading of your post suggests, no.

If you add a random amount of time, the timing attack still works; it averages out, the same way network jitter does. What you need to do is make every request take the same amount of time; randomness is not helpful here.
The problem of ageism is pretty well documented in engineering, especially software engineering.

I'm in my 40s, and I've been programming my entire career. I'm trying to get into management so as to extend my career into my 50s and 60s. The realities are that I likely won't be able to compete against kids 1/2 to 1/3 my age in the next 15 years, so I need to use my experience to my advantage.

It's too bad because I would rather just program.
Many middle class women manage to care for two children while simultaneously shopping and preparing food. The husband fulfills the same economic role as the government does in your example - providing money while being otherwise absent. Why do you feel the poor lack the ability to do the exact same thing the middle class do?

Also, this situation is atypical. About 3/4 of the poor do have a car. 1/4 have more than one.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf
Weather can be a problem for airships. Their max airspeed can be much less than what's needed to maintain station in a strong wind. The US navy also gave up on (manned) airships in the 20s after big storms would bring them down with loss of life.

If you don't mind that they get blown downwind sometimes, or that sometimes you have to ground them, or you just use them mostly during good weather or good seasons, or if they crash and you only lose equipment not people on board, then blimps can be viable.

Some parts of Africa might not even see a lot of seriously adverse weather.
> I don't think people should be afraid to deploy password hashing.

Neither do I, but the whole "don't use crypto" meme says the opposite.

> Just use HTTP Auth and a long random credential

Yes, that is a viable alternative. But it is also one which uses crypto. You're generating a random sequence, and you're using SSL. So once again you run up against the "don't use crypto" argument.

> You said it right here: just use random tokens to key a serverside session store.

But again, you've already introduced secure random number generators and SSL.

The point I was making with all these examples is that they are commonly encountered and can't be solved without crypto. Some of the solutions are easier to screw up than the others, and that's definitely worth talking about. But "don't use crypto" is too simplistic for these kinds of use cases.
That's not the point, and your example is not very fitting. This is a person that just wanted to keep using current services like YouTube.

If "things [really] progress", they should not leave entire groups of people behind. On the contrary, progress is also about lowering the wall that prevents people to get in to the latest and greatest, no matter what their background is. Not raise it.
Here's a gem from an attempt to fix an integer overflow vulnerability in the PHP compiler:

if (size > INT_MAX) return NULL;

http://use.perl.org/use.perl.org/_Aristotle/journal/33448.ht...
Note: we're still running these challenges:

http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/

The current standings are:

* level 0 (4362 players),

* level 1 (335 players),

* level 2 (123 players),

* level 3 (40 players),

* level 4 (21 players),

* level 5 (23 players),

* level 6 (32 players)

We're still donating $20 to PIH or Watsi for everyone who finishes all 6 sets.

The top languages finishers are using are (in order) Python, Go, Ruby, C/C++, C#, Clojure, and Haskell. People are also using Java, PHP, OCaml, Scala, Racket, Javascript, Common Lisp, Perl, Julia(!), erlang, Rust, Visual Basic, Groovy, ObjC, F#, Factor, Dart, and Microsoft Excel(!!!).
The perils of being the voice of reason
Especially since your 20th century definitions aren't correct, it brings into question that your definitions of the 21st are near correct or widely accepted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World
GitHub's keyboard navigation / shortcuts are snazzy, but this is great -- very well done and useful. Only bug I see is that the tree navigation vertical scrollbar on the right side of the "tree" view is hidden by the row numbers. [Firefox 20 on Linux Mint]
You make it sound like these people haven't been working in the field since they got the degree
So is Google a carrier in these locales? Net net this is a Good Thing™ for access in Africa. Unfortunately soon Google and other carriers like them will be asked to implement all sorts of nasty filtering, censoring and generally anti-privacy tomfoolery. How will this play with their base back home in the good 'ole US of A? Recall how Yahoo got lambasted here for their cooperation with China. And they weren't even a carrier.
You're my new hero.
Well, let's face it for real and realise that this is a good thing. Physical letters dying is a good thing for us. We don't need to consume more paper for interpersonal communication.

Let me plug (shamelessly) an online letter-writing service that my friends and I have created:

It's called bubbles: https://bubbleideas.com

We bring true letter-writing experience on the web. It's basically email with doodles, handwriting, ordinary paper like behavior etc. 100% online, supported on iPad/Wacom Pentab and the desktop... :)

While certainly one can't get the smell and fibrous touch of physical paper, but we do go as far as possible to bring letter-like expressions - visual, format-wise and emotional connect on our service.
http://nacl.cr.yp.to/

NaCl is well implemented cryptographic functions designed to be easy to use and fast. As opposed to something like OpenSSL that gives you nine million options, NaCl just does what is best.
50% SVOD2013 conference investors: Accel Partners, Intel Capital, August Capital
Hard to draw ASCII here, but imagine a symlink from "/js/jquery.js" pointing to "/js/jquery-1.2.3.js".

A good application will write output that has a literal copy of the numbered version, and a symlink point to it.

Bad applications either ignore symlinks entirely, or change them to duplicate copies of files. (Which can be bad if you're considering a large file such as foo-latest-release.tar.gz.)
Yahoo's $800 Million Bid for Hulu: Safe, Boring, and Brilliant
Just accept the fact that people who say "don't use crypto" aren't saying "don't hash passwords", nor are they saying "don't generate random numbers", and move on.
I don't know about "only". Sometimes it's good to have a narrow focus on CS topics if you are going to implementing difficult low level stuff that only other techies will touch directly. It's also possible to get knowledge of other fields from places outside of academia.

Most UK universities do offer CS as a joint degree with other subjects, though in many cases they are limited to mainly other STEM subjects. I don't know anyone who studied joint CS/art history for example.
I've grown my leadership skills. As much as I'd love to just code and keep my head down the simple reality is they expect me to step up and guide others. So I study management and process more than I study the latest techniques. Part of it bums me out but part of it is very exciting. I realize now at the latter end of two decades in this career that the true "big" problems in software are usually people or process related. If a project fails or succeeds depends much more on who does the work and how it gets planned and executed than what particular language or techniques you use.

So to sum it all up - I grow my leadership, management, and strategy skills.
Saying that:

This silly algorithm for calculating damages is irrelevant to this claim of theft,

is not the same as saying:

All claims of theft from everyone who uses this silly algorithm for calculating damages are equally true or untrue.

Apologize for the failure in reasoning and the passive-aggressiveness instead.
"Bias" implies the judge was inclined to rule against Apple before ever hearing any evidence.
I think the nature of PBS's regulatory environment makes it tough for them to "tell a true war story," to borrow Wolf's words. This was even apparent in their re-airing of Armadillo, the version that was broadcast on the same channel as Sesame Street was different than the bluray/dvd version.
Just curious how far the Excel hacker(s) got... Also, have you made any hires from the contest yet?
The obvious thing to do would be to fly the balloon above the weather. That would also let you cover more area. The choice becomes whether to have regular launch/recovery at jet stream levels, or to go above it.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_airship it seems that the technology exists to put an airship above the jet stream and keep it in place for a long time. I don't know if that is their solution, but it would make a lot of sense.
Interesting. I've seen increasing number of posts on Github Pages[1], Octopress[2], Medium[3], and Svbtle[4]. It seems that (at least in the hacker community) there is an increasing shift to minimalist blogging stacks. I'm excited to see if the rest of the world follows.

[1] http://pages.github.com/

[2] http://octopress.org/

[3] https://medium.com/

[4] https://svbtle.com/
NaCl and Keyczar are both good options. We also tend to recommend that people simply use PGP for data at rest, and TLS for data in motion. Neither are perfect, but both are subjected to intense scrutiny by researchers.
yeah, i guess i forgot to add the words new a current to it. Seems like every successful and new software developer is (must be) around this area
...And Google continues
to impress
I've used ODesk and Freelancer.com (still use ODESK occasionally), in my experience, It was very difficult to find really good programmers/designers and if there are any, their hourly rate would be really high. on the other hand, I found some excellent and cheap rates for things like translation, data-entry, office-related tasks ..
Looks like you're more focused on "fluffy" fields. What do I click if I do hardware, robotics and embedded software projects? The only options are "writing/editing", "design/illustration", "photo/video", and "web/apps". Or are you not interested in that market at all?

(shameless plug, if you need any hardware, electronics, automation, or firmware work done, poke me at kliment@0xfb.com )
I've never understood why for many professions age/experience is coveted but engineers are assumed to have such a short shelf life. Nobody prefers a 30 year old lawyer or doctor over a more experienced one but an engineer of the same age needs to start planning a career transition...where is the logic in this?
If its so simple yet even after trying to find a good developer and failing you still haven't done it yourself, then its actually not that simple.

The problem is you, not the developers on that site. When you say its simple what that really means is that you cannot or will not pay more than a very small amount of money, and/or even worse, you are unable to comprehend the complexities of the task.

When you post a project and say "its simple", good developers know to avoid you because you are unrealistic and have very little money.

Maybe you even put a number on the project (like $50) or something) advertising just how cheap you are.

One other thing that people say is that freelancers "can't think". What a bunch of horseshit. People who put projects on freelance sites do so because they cannot or will not pay a market rate in the US. That means that the projects were underfunded. Which means that the schedule is inadequate from day one.

Which translates into constant pressure on developers to deliver. Because of the nature of those sites, developers have no choice but to deliver the minimum set of unpolished work that meets only exactly the requirements specified. The number one reason this is necessary is because any attempts by the developer to clarify various issues unforeseen by the client will generally not be comprehended and will simply be assumed to be 'delaying tactics' preventing the completion of their 'simple task'.

So in order for the client to see how complex the task really is and actually come up with new designs, a working system is required. If a freelancer were to try to make his own decisions for the client in regards to application design, the client is very likely to demand the work scrapped and another approach taken.

I am a freelancer. I live in the US. And I have dealt with my share of cheap bastards on sites like odesk and vworker. I have been extremely selective in choosing clients, and still run into all of the issues I mentioned. I feel very bad for all of the Indian programmers who are stuck with assholes who are even cheaper and stupider than the ones I ran into.

You get what you pay for.
Very nice! I was thinking of doing something like this only related to RoR app, so that people could understand/read code of other people much more easily.

This project could be taken in that direction, to make easy for other developers to understand specific projects.
All I'm going to say here is that you would not freaking believe how far the Excel guy has gotten. No VBA, either; it's pure spreadsheet cells.

Yes, we've hired from the challenges (I don't like thinking of it as a contest; I think of it more as an extremely engaging blog post).
Learn 'the next thing' and get jobs (or volunteer!) doing 'the next thing', mod customer needs, your career goals and your tolerance for risk and change. I've moved from Fortran to PL/1 to C to C++ to VB5/VB6 to ASP to PHP to ASP.NET to R. It isn't pretty, but I've stayed employed for 30 years now, mostly in places that suited my needs/goals. Smarter people with better goals should have better career histories than I.
Funny story - quite a few years back I was a sysadmin for a company that was compiling their own PHP with a couple of patches. When I asked about it, my co-worker said it was to suppress some warnings that were spamming the logs whenever someone created an account.

Yes, those warnings were telling us that we weren't using an initialization vector (IV, aka a salt) when hashing the passwords. Facepalm. I suppose that demonstrates the dangers of developers thinking they should be diving into level 3), and also the benefit of (my) being aware of more of the theory than we should have been implementing ourselves.

Yes, I filed a bug to start using hashes, re-hash all our users' passwords, and get rid of the patch. This was also well before those massive GPU cracking systems, so everything turned out fine.
I'd quibble. While I agree it wouldn't be vulnerable in practice, I don't think the longest sniper kill is relevant at all. A battle rifle caliber can definitely break 10,000 feet fired straight up. The issue would be whether it has enough energy left to penetrate the skin of the blimp, and whether it winds up anywhere near where you aimed at.

They're definitely not at risk to the odd potshot, but massed small arms/crew-served rifle fire could potentially be effective in the lower altitudes.
It wasn't a "personal opinion." It was a pre-trial opinion ("opinion" in the formal sense of a judicial decision) on the case. A judge will issue something like this during a bench trial (trial in front of a judge rather than a jury) basically as a way of telling the parties: "based on the evidence I've seen so far I'm leaning towards ruling this way." It's a way of giving the parties an idea of which way the wind is blowing to guide settlement discussions before trial.
My university offered a undergrad CS major with a business minor that was pretty popular.
I think the better course is to follow the Mr Money Mustache idea. Plan, save and invest on purpose, so that you can retire if you want to, or are forced to. Then do whatever you want. You don't have to retire, you can do exactly what you're doing now if you like. If no one wants what you do ... do something else, or "retire" (whatever that means to you).
"progressively less broken solutions"

Now that's a controversial statement if I've ever seen one.
What is a line engineer?
SHA2 has the same problems.
Can this be used as a plugin-free Bittorent Sync alternative?

https://github.com/peer5/sharefest
Thanks! Glad you like it. I just updated it to show the scrollbar better.
You should write a counter-post expanding on what you've said, because this, especially the ending "choose yourself a new profession", is super out-of-whack. All the power to people like you, Ma'am!
On the internet, nobody has to know how old you are. Or at least this was the case, before people started posting every personal detail of themselves online.
Have you actually done B? It does sound sneaky, as you said, so makes me worried.
MD4, MD5, SHA1, and all the SHA2 variants use a structure called Merkle Damgard, which does include the message size. Most are vulnerable to length extension attacks. SHA3 (Ketchup) is not vulnerable to length extension attacks, because resistance to length extension was a design criteria for the SHA3 contest.

Edit: Doh, SHA2-224 and SHA2-384 are truncated and aren't vulnerable
Well, it's probably harder to meaningfully shift the way older consumers live in general. Between regulations and routine, business has an increasingly difficult time selling to us as we age. For all the dollars in pharma, grandma still won't take her pills and grandpa won't get rid of that old beater. Etc.
non-managing software engineer - you write code.
Hulu owners should've taken the $4 billion Google offered them 2 years ago [1]. Now they probably won't even get $1 billion. That's what you get when you're too greedy.

[1] - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2113362/Googles-Hulu-Bi...
> I stretched myself too thin trying to get you there, and I did a stupid thing to pay for it. I hurt you, but instead of casting me away you held me closer, supported me, gave me another chance. I will never forget that.

What's all that about, I wonder?