skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got two issues with this article:
1. It's as if the author is completely unaware of agile practise and benefits as they apply to development and business.
2. Many clients (including some very large ones) profit from Drupal-based solutions which carry lower build and lifetime cost than bespoke.
I wonder if they've heard of these guys: http://ahumanright.org. They had an interesting, albeit somewhat quixotic-sounding, campaign to buy a satellite (TerreStar-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerreStar-1) for the same purpose. Unfortunately, the satellite was sold before they could raise enough money, but it looks like they're still around and contemplating ideas.
Hi,

Please contact me at info@brightinventions.pl. We might have sth for you.
Catharsis. In Portuguese.
Well done, very well done indeed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Image_Labeler
> That's far from true. Many

That appears to be a contradiction.

Furthermore: I'm a developer for software that is mostly used by people making their own website or by service providers who use software like mine and templates to build websites for clients. So I think the impression I got out of that is a little more precise than your N=1 impression.
Seriously, this is Hacker News, not Fox News. Misinformation has no place here. I'm calling you out. Provide evidence to back up your ludicrous claims.

Canola/vegetable oils are just not good for you, do some cursory searches.

This is absolute bullshit. Citations please.

I wonder if all this scaremongering comes from the fact that Canola oil is much cheaper than other oils?

Personally in my kitchen I have coconut oil, olive oil, rice bran oil (about as processed as canola, but much better properties), walnut oil (used sparingly, great flavor) and regular butter. On occasion I'll use regular lard, which is actually pretty healthy.

If you're ok using lard I'd highly suggest you try some Schmaltz. Once a month I render a batch of Schmaltz and its fantastic for roasting vegetables and searing. Its extremely cheap to make, the butcher gives me poultry frames for $1/kg. Its a bonus side product of making stock from the frames and simple to clarify given the natural seperation of water/oil.
Would your position on vendor stability be mitigated if the SAAS was implemented as an appliance that can be imaged, which is placed under software escrow? If the vendor goes out of business, then you know that you will receive a discrete snapshot of what delivered the service (from the appliance, and the image can be dropped into a VM in your infrastructure), and you would receive all the code that the vendor created to implement the appliance.

You are no worse off than buying off the shelf software from closed-source companies, even large ones like Microsoft/IBM/Oracle that can be counted upon to be around in ten years. I see clients of mine get stranded by those companies all the time on just old versions of products that simply go out of support. In fact, if you get the appliance and the developed source code, you're in a better position because at least then you have the option to explore the feasibility of modifying the code to make it continue to work for your needs.
Similarly, my father bought my grandfather a large HP touchscreen all-in-one PC and an iPad. From what I can tell, he uses the iPad for most things during the day- web browsing, email, youtube) and the desktop PC almost exclusively for printing things and Skype. I think the desktop helps him with video chat, since holding the iPad at an angle where his face is visible for any prolonged amount of time seems to be problematic with him (also, he always covers the camera with his hands).
good point. most of the startups are working on trivial problems faced by 20somethings.
"Stop looking for a developer." -- this is an interesting trend that is slowly, but surely, gaining traction. It's really taking hold in the indie game world, a lot of people now make games with GameMaker, Stencyl, and the like and often don't need a developer.

It makes a lot of sense that this will take place in the website and mobile app world too. I wonder what developers will be doing in 5 years, when most/all CRUD apps can be built with drag and drop.
Does that mean that if your quality score isn't high enough, Google will pocket your adwords money and never actually show your ads? That sounds incredibly dishonest.
The dungeon keeper "clone" is not really a clone, it takes the assets from the original game and hack the executables to make it more friendly to recent pc (i'll check it anyway!)
Few thoughts - why MD5 in the example at all? I thought that SHA-2 was the go to for hash functions nowadays.

And a question on the timing attack - how real it is? Because in the response time you have a lot of random variables which with the current fast servers will take more time than the calculation itself.

You receive request - how fast it will go trough the loadbalancer is random, then you must read the shared secret, then you must log the request somewhere and the whole hmac calculation is milisecond or less.
I'm guessing the nonsense is somehow connected to anti-GM and Monsanto and GM rapeseed. It's not a popular crop in England. People say it's bad for hay fever sufferers.

Olive oil does have much better word-of-mouth marketing.
We have the problem here in the UK and the likely rest of Europe. Some employers just aren't interested in treating their staff well, but for those who are, having a better standard to follow is nice.
> This is a case of potential piracy...

I think you're correct. As I understand it, one can not legally protect a page layout. (Imagine how difficult it would be to publish a book if people could protect things like "black times roman typeface on white background with one inch borders.") The description of a layout to a computer can be copyrighted as a form of expression, so one can copyright their specific CSS description of a page layout. It's interesting to note that the benefits of even this form of copyright protection is contentious: If a layout can only practically be expressed to the computer in a few different ways, then the odds of accidental infringement are very high.
The answer is simple: absolutely! This is clear based on the amount of feedback in this thread alone. Circumstances are different depending on who you talk to but it can clearly be done, and without all the "help" and perks this guy mentions.

I've seen it many times myself first-hand and now I'm living it. I'm in the process of launching my new startup (www.promoter.io) right now with a 2.5 year old son and I just came from being an early employee/executive at another fast moving startup (www.appfog.com).

Oh, and at the same time, my son is battling leukemia. So often times I'm doing some work from the doctors office (~3-5 times per week without fail) or from the hospital.

It can be done, it's simply a matter of how you prioritize I guess.
Show HN: OpenSCAD converted to Javascript with Emscripten
Contrary to (popular?) opinion most of Africa is not a warzone. With extremely few exceptions (Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo), most of Sub-Saharan Africa is in the middle of an extended period of peace.

It's inconceivable that if ever deployed, any of these blimps will be interfered with in the airspaces of East Africa (aside from Somalia) or over any country south of them.
This thread interests me as well. Java is the acquire currency language currently - it would be nice to leverage an advanced knowledge level for something beyond the 25$ an hour rate you see on odesk or freelancer.
Hey guys,

got this thread from a friend (Nodesocket). I am usually cautious about promoting myself in threads like this since it is almost impossible not to sound spammy. BUT with that said I will do it anyway for a simple reason; a bunch of you have pointed out the challenge with quality, vetting, good vs cheap freelancers.

I started Coworks because I had such a huge need of great freelancers, and couldn't find a good way to find and manage quality people. (This is my 4th startup, so I bought a lot of freelancing work over the years)

And I do think we have solved a bunch of these issues with Coworks. We are entirely built on social recommendations, manual curation and are explicitly not targeting "cheap" freelancers. It is still early days, but our first customers seems to like us. (This is how it works https://coworks.com/works)
Fukushima: Inside the Exclusion Zone
The answer is "Yes, and the flip side of that is that I have to continue maintaining, supporting, and upgrading the application as long as you are paying for it, too."
The title is deceptive because shortly after asking that question in the article, the author comes to a resounding "no" and goes on to talk about why it is our impression that SV only works on the problems of 20-somethings. The core of the author's comment comes at the end:

"Imagine how odd it would be to read an article saying that the people who work for manufacturing firms are really just out to make money, or that they don’t seem interested enough in current events. It is only because Silicon Valley has done such an extraordinary job branding itself that articles about their social conscience, or lack thereof, seem completely reasonable. But the tech sector is, on the whole, much more like other sectors of the economy than it likes to believe, or than it likes anyone else to believe."
This is a new site I've created for sharing models for 3D printing. What I thought would be interesting to HN readers is another example of software converted to Javascript with Emscripten. Also, if you try it out in Firefox 23 you'll see quite how much a difference asm.js can make.
I'm not an expert, but I can see a problem with schemes along those lines. MD5 (and similar) extension attacks also take advantage of the padding added after the thing you want to hash; so eg

Secret: secret
Message: foo&bar
Let's include the length and hash 'secretfoo&bar13'

What you actually hash is 'secretfoo&bar130x80...padding...0x20'. What the attacker sees as the 'known hash' includes this padding. When you perform an extension attack, the attack message would look like: secretfoo&bar130x80...padding...0x02&evil . At this point you're adding on the length and hashing it, so what you compare with is 'secretfoo&bar130x80...padding...0x02&evil93' ... but the attacker can precompute that hash just as easily as the one with just 'evil' appended.

You could argue that your hashes would be constructed a bit differently (eg make messages that appear to have internal padding illegal; still vulnerable, btw), but the point is - you're still tinkering with the same basic structure, and are likely to make more mistakes. You're better off switching to HMAC for this application.
- Relying on undefined or implementation-specified behavior. Problems only show up years down the road. (example issue: expecting signed overflow to wraparound in C)

- Avoiding statistical biases when transforming random values. Statistical unit tests are hard. (example issue: shuffling via lots of uniformly random swaps)

- Integer overflow ruining algorithms that would be correct, given unbounded integers. (example issue: average = (a+b)/2)
Dear WordPress
I'm in my mid-thirties and I sent my last handwritten letter last week.

I write on Crown Mill writing paper, which has a great feel against the fingertips, using a mid-range Cross fountain pen. People often express their appreciation at receiving a handwritten letter on quality paper, written in a smooth, flowing ink and cursive handwriting. It gets remembered.
Really fast weight loss
Losing weight fast and easy is now possible with Customized Fat Loss. It is incredible and special for you to help you achieve the perfect body!!!
You sound like you're trying to learn several things at once. How do you e.g. expect to successfully learn a technique like TDD, if you constantly have peculiarities of a new OS getting in the way?

Try to absorb new things one at a time, and then expand onward.
SntapCamera A Buttonless, Swipe and Tap Based Camera App for iOS
Google charges you only when someone clicks on your ad. So you don't get charged for your ad showing unless someone clicks on it. The way it all started out was to show good quality ads to people. Just like search results the idea is to make ads also as relevant as possible to the user. Not defending Google, just stating facts. Some changes they have made recently (enhanced campaigns) may not be as advertiser friendly as promoted.
What are you talking about? I reach the footer after pressing PgDn eight times.
If so, it's probably only because young adults are more likely to use the internet and therefore have problems that can be solved by the internet.

The internet can't really fix your problems if you don't use it in the first place. Or maybe it could, but you will never know better.
Another big issue not addressed here is the reluctance by project owners to completely turn over design. In the enterprise, the outlays for development are typically covered by another department, and in most cases that's marketing.

So if marketing is paying the bills for the website, they are going to get final say on what the website looks like. After all, they design the commercials, they write the radio ads and come up with the campaigns, why shouldn't they be designing the website to seamlessly integrate the current add campaign into the website?
Sucks to be an old engineer
The attacker just needs to include the updated length, which he can likely calculate since the shared secret is probably the same length for all accounts-even if it is not he only needs it for this request--and he knows the length of the parameters and their values. It would take some guesswork and trial and error to nail it down, and the attacker would have to guess that the length was included in the first place. Assuming he has plenty of time and processing power it is not infeasible. There are a lot of fairly easy things you could add to make it more difficult to attack.
South supports Python 3 as of a couple of days ago.

http://www.aeracode.org/2013/5/22/south-08-migrations-and-dj...
This argument keeps coming up, and while its premises are valid, its conclusion never sits right with me, namely: "Don't use cryptography." That advice isn't practical for developers. There are plenty of systems we have to design where crypto is not optional. Examples:

* Storing passwords. You can't store them in plaintext.

* Signing requests (like in the OP's example). What are the alternatives? You can store some kind of authentication in the cookie, which then gets sent with each request. You can use HTTP auth. But in any scenario, you're definitely using SSL, and you're probably using some other kind of crypto on top of that.

* Encrypting cookies. You should store as little as possible in cookies--ideally just a single identifier. But even so, it's very important to make cookies tamper-resistant. You can't, e.g. just have a plaintext cookie that says "userid=42."

So what does the OP propose we do? If this article were making the usual case that we shouldn't implement our own crypto algorithms, I'd agree 100%. But he seems to be taking it a step farther, and saying we shouldn't even use existing crypto libraries, because we'll misuse them. But what are the alternatives?
Your own pedalboard and effects system, without any hardware, on the web, with jacascript, which means you do not have to install or run anything extra like java, and it is open-source. Easy to install, too! create your art, on the cloud.
I was able to get it by pull the scroll bar on the right hand side down all the way. 15 scroll wheels down did it, too.
The claimed original work here is not a WordPress theme.
yep basically 100% agree. My grandmother got an iPad a while ago and its sooo easy for her to do everything. I think it helps that the iPad forces you to only be doing one thing at a time (e.g. when on the internet, you won't get a popup disturbing/distracting you. Or a notice from iTunes or some other program saying it needs to be updated. These are all distractions from your main focus - in this case reading the news or whatever)

Computers are great but a classic desktop offers too many distractions for my grandmother.
Today's 20 somethings are tomorrows 30 and 40 somethings. Get them hooked young and you can milk them for a lifetime.

It's probably easier to persuade a 20 something to try something new. I know middle aged people who choose smartphones by waiting for their kids to each buy different ones and then choosing one of these for themselves.
[context: I am Dove's husband and acted as her administrative assistant on vWorker]

Really, what it comes down to from my perspective is that freelancer is not geared toward the type of freelancing we're trying to do: making a living as professionals in a first-world country.

As professionals, we have reason to want to grant limited account access to a secretary, accountant, or sub-contractor. This feature existed on vWorker, but not Freelancer.

As professionals, we want to be rated and visible based on delivering quality work on time and on budget and making our clients happy. On vWorker, ranking/visibility was based entirely on revenue x client rating, with a bonus "top worker" designation for never missing a deadline or having a bad rating. On Freelancer, we level up by following you on social media, get badges for logging in every day for a year, and generally get ranked according to tangential criteria. It's distracting, and appears unprofessional to clients who are being asked to "level up" and "earn badges" themselves when all they want to do is hire us.

As professionals, we don't bid until we've already come to terms with the client. On vWorker, we'd regularly have dozens of messages with clients establishing the details of a project, discussing timelines, etc. and then we'd put in a bid with that full understanding. Freelancer seems geared toward submitting a large number of bids without having ever really discussed terms -- the sort of thing that might work for "transcribe a 10 minute audio clip", but not for projects measured in months and costing $x0,000 to complete.

As professionals, we want to pay our $50 monthly fee and our 2% per-contract cut, use the site to connect with clients with real large-scale contracts, and get paid on a reasonable timescale. Trying to do that on freelancer is an exercise in frustration.
> I would guess that most developers should stay at around level 2 as much as possible, delving into level 3 only when required and never further.

Why would you advocate that people stay away from learning cryptography? They should know as much as possible, they just should avoid implementing it.
How does this article share both of these statements?:

"BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That"

"Maybe Sync is not an out-and-out DropBox killer, but it does look likely to broaden the scope of what we understand by file storage and change what customers expect from file storage services"

So is it, or isn't it?

Praise to the BitTorrent folks in any event. I've been using Sync for a few weeks now and I've been pleased with its performance thus far. I'm debating whether I want to shut off Dropbox, but Dropbox still has several great features, versioning in particular.
>turn off 2 finger scrolling

This is insane advice.
It's all relative, it's the feeling of having more, not the actual amont of money that counts. the relative feeling of increase, having more than the Jones and stuff like that.

Because the actual trick to have an absolute lot of money is not linked to the hours worked. It's about working in Wall Street, or in some criminal activities, or in some investment. It's never about time spent at the desk, the whole point of earning loads of money is to decouple the revenue from the time worked. You have to earn money while you sleep. Then, why not earning while you tan?

That's the whole discussion between J.Schwartz and B.Gates on the java patents. And I think Gates knows a little bit about having loads of money (I can't say the same about Schwartz).
I Guess this makes sense, Here in India the largest online store, flipkart has their own delivery services for the tier one cities. This happened because the private couriers were pretty bad.
It's obvious that whoever designed Email on Acid has never taken any good acid.
The claimed original work sells as a template separately from the (optional, Mac-only) StampReady app.
Maybe the good people would be a bit less likely to keep you at arm's length if you didn't come off as assuming by default that founders and VCs are out to get you, which is pretty annoying and self destructive.
Paid vacation days are accumulated by time worked.

If they work only 20 hours a week they will be entitled to half of the yearly paid vacations that a full-time worker is entitled to.

It's a little bit more complex than that because local laws in Europe differ about how many hours each person needs to work continually to accumulate a portion of a day off, but the principal is generally correct.
There aren't any, learn how the libraries work and use them. I agree with your point, in that respect.

Also, about the cookies, you can definitely have a plaintext cookie saying userid=42, as long as it's signed.
That is exactly what I meant... the HTML spec really needs sarcasm tag by default. But from purely engineering viewpoint they have performed marvelously.

As a rule I hate purely technical/financial solution that helps someone to isolate himself from a social problem and not solving it.
Sure, but this is physics, so we can stick with our spherical cows and other first order approximations without losing too much sleep... :-)
I've been haxing for some time now, and I know of at least one startup that uses/used it (Profitably).

In short, Haxe can produce swf and neko binaries and C++, C#, JS, Java and PHP source.

Language itself is, for my humble old school OOP taste, really well done and compiler is blazing fast. So fast that people now implement real-time error checking by simply compiling project (with few additional flags).

Real perk here for me (a game dev) is not so much Haxe as libraries for cross-platform development, namely NME, which appears to have some restructuring going on right about now [1]. It is SDL-based haxe library that's really the one powering cross-platform game deployment. And it's pretty great at that, but a bit unstable. The goals outlined in the video linked should get that on the right track.

Of other interesting things, 2d physics engine named nape [2] comes to mind. It blows Box2d out of the water in oh-so-many aspects, particular ones being memory and framerate stability.

[1] http://vimeo.com/66996045

[2] http://napephys.com

Edit:
...and it has absolutely amazing community of doers!
How rich would you be if you’d bought Apple shares instead of a Mac in 2003?
Follow-up question: when is Stripe going to be out of beta in the UK?
There are many more "founder dads" than people assume. When you become "baseball dad" you will find out that about 15% of all parents in the league are entrepreneurs of some kind. And there is additional 30% of them talking about starting something (from cop trying to start security service to some quite complex biotech stuff).

It seems like when your kids are older than 7 then the probability of being entrepreneur increases as kids get older.

Completely unscientific but make sense.
With thousands of tries, you can apparently average the noise out pretty effectively, so timing attacks are very possible.
State of the art multiple years ago was 100ns over LAN (aka datacenter). It's something to worry about. Honestly, I'd be extra paranoid and use a construct that hashes the supplied digest an extra time on top of doing a timing-safe comparison.