skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, I don't think it is my responsibility to ensure contractors are paid X, that is their responsibility, they set the rate. I decide if I think their skills match their rate. I can't decide what is "good" medical care for them, nor can I decide how much it costs (maybe he has a medical condition and needs 20k a month just for insurance). I can't decide what a stable financial situation is for someone either. The arrogance of someone who thinks they can baffles me. I might think 200k is plenty, but I have no idea about what contractor X consider "plenty" and to assume is simply projecting.

As for him being my problem. If a contractor can't work, you replace them, depending on how the contract was setup, you might collect some insurance to help get over the ugly transition.
Few do, but I genuinely thought that the OP was, so no semantic debate was intended :) (And I have actually seen people say that elsewhere.) While the OP didn't mention random numbers specifically, his prohibition on using crypto seemed general enough that I assumed it to include random numbers. Ditto for hashing. Certainly, his method of argument--describe the technique, show a vulnerability the reader might not have heard of--could be applied to both password hashing and random numbers.

I realize, however, that you have a more charitable interpretation of what the OP was suggesting. I think you and I mostly agree about the substantive issue: Crypto should be used, but as you said, developers owe it to users to make it work. My disagreement isn't with you but with the OP and others who seem to suggest tossing aside crypto because it's too hard to get right.

I just realized I haven't proposed a positive alternative to the "don't use crypto" meme, though. I honestly don't know what the answer is, I'm afraid. Realistically, lots of devs need to use crypto, and we can't all develop your level of expertise in that area. (The founder of a security consultancy will always know a lot more about security than generalist app developers. Only so much time in the day.) So becoming a true crypto/security expert can't be the solution, even if that would be the best one. The best realistic solution I can think of is for authors of crypto libraries to provide enough documentation that devs can use it safely.
Yes, the folks using version control of any kind, let alone git, are in the minority.
Exactly, we pursue drunk drivers even if they never meant any harm. Mens rea is not universally required.
Probably the Japanese author was fascinated by the Jews style of negotiation because there are very few in Japan.

I work with many different cultures but in our field I prefer the American Win/Win style to the Japanese. Since the author doesn't differentiate between Jews of different countries I can say that I don't like the style of negotiation of Israelis that in general use a lot of bargaining.
> ...and a tasty, gruel-free breakfast

Hey, I love gruel!

I just wish I had more time to make it...
Maybe a coincidence? There's also mention of 'kids', 'school', 'students', etc. However, I'd guess the technology is there to do facial recognition... not sure how that's effective for any advertiser's end goals though... except maybe certain cases of demographics, like if you are on a body building website then you show ads that have people with big necks.
"it's an era when RAID controllers were the size of a modern day sound card"

That doesn't make much sense to me. For those that don't just use what's on the motherboard, even PCI cards are pretty small. RAID controllers that I remember, OTOH, were pretty beefy.

Regardless, cool looking place. I'm glad they're able to make a go of it.
Even if you did not see the hose, I would never even think of washing my feet in the water where people are swimming. It's like puking into someone's plate, you just don't do this kind of things, there's not way you can justify by "i didn't know".

And it's not about race, it's about culture. I have no problems with Chinese people who have been educated in other countries. But people coming from Mainland China, it's almost systematic: they don't care and act just like they were homeless or something, not matter how rich they are. (and the ones I saw were rich to be able to stay where they were staying).
There are many state schools as large as Michigan, such as Penn State, Ohio State, University of Illinois. Illinois in particular actually has a larger CS department but their hackers don't come anywhere close to the turnout Michigan gets. None of the other large schools do. That being said, this shows how impressive of a feat this is for Penn and other small private schools.
Productivity hacks of a startup dad
The elephant in the room is that this isn't incompetence, it is motivation. These people don't fear or respect the US so what motivates them to do what the US wants? They will do just enough to collect the money being offered and then do what they want in the way they want. If they want to kill some Americans, defect or just desert then they will do it and what is really to stop them?

Germany started out with tons of world-class military men and they were not being trained or directed by a hated power, rather the opposite, they were working against hated outside powers. So no motivation problem there.

No training technique will substitute for motivation.
There's a big difference between corporate hackathons and collegiate hackathons, I think. The former are exploitative and weird; the latter are inspiring and awesome.

(I organize HackMIT, our big hackathon)
That's why the Blowfish algorithm is the best choice for password hashing.

The algorithm uses CPU cycles to generate the hash. So there is no way to speed it up, just by using a faster computer.
Note, when they say "quality and breeding", I'm pretty sure they're using a poor translation of the word 素质. I would translate it more like "character". I think it means how you behave when no one is looking.
Two Days with The Nexus 4
I've seen a fair amount of both.

The former ("don't build your own crypto") is clearly correct.

The latter ("don't use crypto") is what I disagree with. One example of this meme comes from the OP, who ends his article with: "Save yourself the trouble. Don't use cryptography. It is plutonium."
> This trend towards saving time by sacrificing basic requirements like eating and sleeping is increasingly absurd. In a year or two, I'll open Hacker News and there'll be an article in the top ten that describes how you, too, can Avoid Wasting Time Due To Lengthy Bowel Movements. Don't believe the hype. Have a good night's rest, followed by a leisurely shit and a tasty, gruel-free breakfast you made yourself, and you'll be a better person for it.

As it happens, it's much healthier for your colon to squat and have a nice quick shit rather than sitting on the toilet and taking your time. Unfortunately, no one does this in some places because they don't really have squatting toilets.
I was all ready to get up into high dudgeon about hiring people who are capable but can't get along with others - but that's not what this article is about at all.

The author wants to hire people of integrity, not yes-men, and makes a particular point of hiring people who complement his skills. He also touches on several other points that might be undervalued in today's hiring climate.

Very good stuff IMO
Hi Dove/lotharbot,

Thanks for your feedback. Some of the vWorker freelancers I agree were exceptional - this is why they are now at the top of the leaderboard in many categories. vWorker users earnings are, on a whole, up about 50% post acquisition from what they were before. If you send me an email I can look into your accounts and see if I can make a recommendation for you, if you like (my email is easy to guess @freelancer.com).

Re/ sub-accounts, we are looking at this, the actual use on vWorker was very low (less than ~500 users out of 2.5m). This is why we haven't implemented yet. We are looking at it, however.

You are mixing up the Freelancer leveling system with reputation. Reputation is completely distinct. Reputation is simply volume (dollar) weighted ratings on a per category basis. Thus the highest rated, most paid freelancers are at the top of reputation for a given skill. The gamification system is completely distinct and has no influence on the bid list, this is purely like a frequently flyer program in giving back perks to users who are good on the site (as distinct to those good at work).

Yes, we are a much bigger marketplace than vWorker. So there are more bidders, but also substantially more projects. We do have projects that are well over $250,000 on an ongoing basis.

No platform charges 2%. vWorker charged 15% flat. You can get down to 3% on Freelancer, the lowest commission in the industry for $49.95.

If you get in contact with me, I will see how I can help.

Regards
Matt
This is great!

You should remove the shadows, or provide an option to turn them off perhaps. It might give a better view of how the colors play with each other.
theoretically, that could be solved by plugin to aerofs or btsync that would use freely available cloud storage at dropbox/skydrive/gdrive/etc to store diffs between you laptop and desktop during your commute or weekend. now, we need such plugin written.
And yet, there is a lot of condemnation from the mainland Chinese themselves.

Anyways, regardless of who is doing it, I think it's better to let them know they are doing it wrong, right when they are doing it because:

1) maybe they innocently don't know better and want to know better
2) you don't want that resentment to fester in your mind
3) you don't want to take out that resentment on someone else of the same race (which always seem to be happen)

Much easier said than done of course.
Bring Back the Draft
We also have a mailing list we regularly send out updates to that we set up after the Rails vuln fiasco - you can sign up for it here, if interested: https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/railscheck
I found this really annoying for some time now, too. I hope with someone like Garry being vocal about this issue Facebook will act and fix it.
A bit sensationalist, but gets the point across I guess
It's not easy to replace talented people.
Hi Octopus

Thanks for the feedback

1) Yes we are trying to crack down on the bid spam. However the marketplace is very liquid you will also almost always find that there is actually someone at the other end, so when you get 10 bids in 60 seconds if you start to chat there is a human at the other end. We get almost 1 million bids per month now. No other marketplace on the Internet comes close to liquidity (about 950k/mo now). This is great for finding people quickly and getting the right price for your project.

2) Well 5 billion people on this planet live on $8 day or less, I think you can't say just because someone is willing to work for 2-3 days for $30 they are automatically "bad".

3) Labour arbitrage is something we are looking at. It usually does not result in lower quality, quite the contrary, because the guys doing the arbitrage (flipping projects) need to retain a high reputation score or they will blow their accounts up and the business model will stop working. Right now they are acting as quality and customer service managers so they actually enhance the result for the end user.

4) Yes I absolutely agree, and we are looking into how this can be done better.

Regards
Matt
That's highly dependent on the school. At my high school (rural Iowa) I can't see anyone taking issue with a pro-gun stance on a essay.
You could have worded it better then because I thought the same thing too.
He was complaining about the daily digests :)

We have thousands of projects per day posted. We need probably better fine grained control over the timing of these emails, I can tell you that if we send less emails we get complaints, if we send more we get complaints! We have to perhaps let the user decide the frequency.
true, but it is very unlikely event, to loose all of them at the same time, esp if n>2 and they aren't at the same location (e.g. 1 office, 1 home, 1 in transit)
How about not having your wallet locked because you failed to notify paypal that you were going to receive large amounts of money in the near future?

Bitcoin gives you flexibility that PayPal doesn't. You can't opt-out of protections that PayPal gives you in order to streamline your process; you either use PayPal or you don't. Bitcoin allows you to potentially chose any number of companies to provide services to you, or just roll your own solution.
Agree as I said about we will look at fine grained control over how many digests a user wants to receive. Some people do not browse the site at all but want INSTANT emails when a new project comes on. Some people want 1 email a day.
I am an outsider, but I've seen the inside of this machine.

I came to Ann Arbor from LA in 2009 in order to build stuff in a hacker-friendly and foodie town that is a financially rational place to live.

But I didn't expect to find this community of startupy freaks at UM. They are gung-ho in a lets-go-to-the-football-game sort of way. They are often innocent to technological limits, and at times godawfully ruthless. I also notice a particular affinity for building things quickly and then moving on. But they are doing amazing work at MPowered and have roped in a lot of people who would have otherwise marched into corporate oblivion.

UMich hackathon culture is what germinated my current startup, rapt.fm, in January, 2012. A lot of folks involved in MPowered helped the demo get built on that weekend and put in a lot of hours throughout the buildup since then, (including David, the writer of the article).

As great as it is for Michigan, I do think that most of these folks will head out to the Bay Area. But enough will stick around here where the woods run deep and the people are happy.
Rampant speculation, but while drinking me and some developer friends came up with a theory on this. There was a sweet spot, a golden age if you will where a lot of things came together for kids / young adults to drive them to be developers. They are 25 to 40 now.

Computers became cheap enough to have at home. BBSs and then the Internet took off. Computers were doing stuff -- but not common place yet. It was an odd window during a technologies birth that I think got people hooked in a way that is hard to emulate. Too early, you are on punch-cards and computers are rare. Too late, and you have app stores and iphones and stuff just generally works so it can be treated as a dumb tool. Sheer luck.
The article explains how all the passwords were revealed except for "qeadzcwrsfxv1331". Maybe I missed it but could anybody point out to me which method revealed this password? The letters seem to not form any words that I know, and although is appended with a number and consists of only lower case letters, it's still 12-letters long, longer than any brute-forced in the article. Edit: They tried all the keyboard typing patterns I suppose, I just realized the pattern of the string when typed on the keyboard.
Thank You So Much! We will work to get it across the border asap.
Oh, if you enjoy cooking, then by all means do it yourself.

But otherwise, you might want to do it in the most efficient manner possible (or let somebody else whose time you are paying for do it efficiently).
Wow, I never knew that (not much of a start-up guy myself, admittedly).

This is really interesting (from their blog):

"By the start of 2013, we were working on a handful of projects. Sometimes collectively, sometimes independently. One day, Rob said, “There must be a more efficient way to eat.” He researched the human nutritional needs and was frustrated to find that nutrition is not quite a hard science right now. Regardless, he identified the essential ingredients the body needs to thrive and, a few days later, began constructing his alternative diet using supplements purchased on Amazon. Pleased with initial testing, he committed to his newly invented diet for 30 days."

So, despite food science lacking foundations and rigour (in the most neutral way) right now, he still figured out (well, almost, just needed a month of testing and we're good to go!) an unsolved question, without any formal training, in a few days.

In the context of their previous failure it just makes me even more inclined to wonder what they're really planning -- their noble goals seem smell much more like marketing bullshit now.

I hope I'm wrong.
I tried adding a Coinbase button to one of my sites a few days ago, but it took ages to load the JavaScript button.

Maybe one of their next moves should be finding a fast CDN for such stuff.
Thank you for posting this.

This article is incredibly refreshing, and I think people in the position to hire new employees should definitely read this. I wish more people had such integrity.
Try looking at the pattern the letters form on the keyboard...
I’m not sure you understood what he meant by “good.”

> The opposite of good is bad. The opposite of nice is unlikeable.

That’s still a little vague. “Good” can mean “skilled” (as I think you interpreted it), but he actually means “honest and ethical.” For instance: “Deborah was … clearly qualified …, but she called … and said, ’I have to drop out. I’m pregnant. The plan was that I wouldn’t tell you I was pregnant and work for six months, go on leave, and decide later if I’d come back. But now I realize I cannot do that to you, and I cannot do that to the other people who might deserve the job more than me. Then it hit me that I cannot do that to anyone because I’m about to be a mom and I have to think about what kind of role model I want to be for my child.’ … Good people like [Deborah] are hard to find.”
If you do not believe they are equivalent, then there was no point in asking if I would act the same way for both situations.

I understand you were trying to show some sort of hypocrisy in my logic, but that isn't an argument in itself, and since, by your own admission, they are different situations, it's wrong to compare them in the first place.
That's really cool for 'artistically impaired' people, too. I couldn't find even two matching colors if my life depended on it.
I would much rather see people working on self-driving cars or solving problems that affect the world than see the 15784th to-do app, weather app, etc. Those only change the fortunes of a handful of people, let's be serious.
Instead of just complaining about a qz.com site, you offered an alternative, and even made a proper comment. More karma to you.
This system is only exposed to you personally, it is not exposed to employers and has no effect on your on-site rating whatsoever (which we call reputation, a metric)
> Just write upfront on the signup form, "we don't hash or protect your passwords in any way. Do not reuse passwords from other sites. Create a unique password and retrieve it using a password manager."

For one, I'd consider that bad business. If you want to make money, it's not a good idea to declare to users that your system is insecure.

More importantly, you're now putting all the responsibility on the user. Yes, it's good for users to think about security. Yes, it's impossible to 100% guarantee the security of your users' passwords. But disclaiming all responsibility? We're the ones with more technical knowledge, not our users. We should bear as much of the burden of security as we can.

> Password hashing is a losing battle

Your argument here seems to boil down to the idea that GPUs are now capable of cracking any password hashing scheme we have, assuming weak passwords. My understanding was that this was not the case, but perhaps I'm wrong. As far as I know, you can set the difficulty factor in Bcrypt high enough that it's impractical to crack on any commodity hardware. There's also scrypt, which is supposedly even stronger in this respect, although I don't know if it's been adequately vetted yet.
Yeah thanks, I literally realized that as I hit reply on that comment lol
I don't think it's that difficult to use, but I certainly welcome any feedback once you try it.
Developers can always quit. The only reasons they don't is that they love to code, and they are hoping for an equity cash-out from an IPO or acquisition down the line.
I loved that place when I lived in Silicon Valley back in the late '80s and early '90s.

They were on Kern Ave just west of the Lawrence Expressway. Nearby on the other side of the street (where Sports Basement is now) was Fry's flagship store. Across Lawrence from the Fry's, there was the original store for Computer Literacy Bookshops, and right near that was a Togo's.

A perfect geek Saturday afternoon for me was to go hit Weird Stuff and Fry's, then Computer Literacy to check for new books and pickup the latest tech magazines, then read those magazines while enjoying either a cold #2 or a hot #7 from Togo's.
Hi Harrjj, if you have any specific feedback on features or issues I'm happy to look at them.

Regards
Matt
The entire population of Africa is less than the population of India or China, and far below the two of them combined.
Ask HN: Am I committing career suicide?
I've been working in IT as a software engineer for almost 12 years now. Half of that in Europe with J2EE, the latter half in the Bay Area as a web developer in .NET.

I'm starting to become more and more bored with work. I started to look around for other opportunities, but I feel it's hard to do that while working full time. Also, my problem does not seem to be with that particular job, it's with the whole corporate world. Being forced to sit at a desk the whole day. I'm still motivated to work on my own projects after work and on the weekends. I still like programming. I just don't like coding stuff for other people.

Long story short, I'm preparing to take a time out. Maybe one year, maybe two, maybe only six months. My savings could probably sustain my current lifestyle for 5-10 years, if not more. My plan would be to crank out mobile apps, maybe one every two months, see if any of them can make some money. If it doesn't work, I could use them as a reference to get a mobile dev job, hopefully at a company with a product I can be passionate about.

Am I crazy to give up a six figure salary just because I don't feel like being employed anymore? I'm in my mid-late thirties, will I even find a new job with a gap in my resume like this? Any first hand experiences? I'm single, no kids.
Hi Brian, what do you mean specifically?