skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has lived in Germany for many years and experienced the pros and cons of Deutsche Bahn and now lives in the UK, all I can say is you have no idea how good things are in Germany.
It is always great to read your comments on subjects like these.

I'm left though wondering whether society's attentions should be focused on the plight of your "rat-racers" --- the doctors, lawyers, software salespeople. They may be caught in any number of collective action problems, but on the whole American productivity is high and the parts of society that rat-racers engage with are generally not dysfunctional. Rat-racers in the US are not generally working themselves to death, like they are in Asia. So I'm not sure how concerned I should be about the work-life balance of someone making $250,000/yr.

The median household income in the US is $44,000. Does mandatory vacation help a family of 4 making $44,000? Or would they be better off with higher wages?

Perhaps I have 'yummyfajitas to blame for this, but every time an issue like this comes up on HN, I can't help but think about the differing quality of life between the US middle class and the rural poor of Asia. Humanity's big problem is probably not improving the lot of Americans.
On the other hand, IT salaries are way higher in the US than they are in Europe. When I see people here talking about $100k a year like it's normal thing to have I feel that difference.
Liberty Reserve digital money service forced offline
I've heard great things about Haxe for game development.
Apparently it beats the crap out of Flash for portability when target desktop and mobile.
> It's because of the internal mechanism (a "Merkel Damgard Construction") intrinsic to hash functions like MD5, SHA1, SHA256 and friends. Even if MD5 were cryptographically secure, this vulnerability would still present itself if used in the way I described.

Thanks for pointing that out, didn't know that.

Just for fun, if they had written message+secret instead of secret+message it would have been ok (although bad practice)?

calculated_mac = OpenSSL::Digest::MD5.hexdigest(message+secret)
There are numerous issues involved in here. You're assuming that with a union you guys will be able to get everything you want.

Don't forget a few things. The merger meant new look at the books. If Delta was doing something inefficiently, now the merger forced them to reconsider. If things had continued as they did, you have no guarantee that your gf would have kept her job if Delta just went bankrupt instead.

Unions only benefit one group of people at the cost of another group which you usually fail to see.

The only way workers' salary/benefits go up when their real productivity goes up, which only goes up as capital accumulation goes up.

In most of the cases, unions actions either make non-union member suffer, or more experienced members benefit at the cost of less experienced members. Some people get fired, and the new union numbers suggest that overall wages went up.

Not only that, many times the hours are cut for some workers, so they have to pick extra jobs in other industries so the wages are depressed in other industries. Take for instance almost all struggling actors/actresses work as a bartender or waiting jobs in NY/LA, because of heavy unionization they just don't have enough work to work full time as an actor. So they suppress wages of waiting industry.

Nepotism is very heavily promoted in unionized industries, because if wages are artificially pushed up, then the industry entrants, cannot be chosen for a job based on how cheap they come, so other factors can be considered(like relationships with existing union members, etc). In hollywood, this is precisely the whole conspiracy about people of one specific religion/ethnic group control everything. Or this is why you have to sleep with someone to get your big break.
So why is it politically incorrect to advocate not procreating until in a viable & believably permanent relationship?
>People like them fine as they are. Young people at least. As for the older people, they will give their place to younger people sooner or later.

I doubt that. At least I am a young German and I prefer my trains to be clean. And I'm absolutely certain most young people here think the same way.

There is graffiti that I enjoy, but the majority of it doesn't exactly improve the looks of things.

Also, there is a slight problem with people feeling insecure when using public transportation due to repeated incidents where people were beaten up or stabbed in trains. Having graffiti all over the place makes especially older people less likely to use public transportation and therefore reduces the income.
Your dreams are useless
You can experiment with a language-lovers language that compiles to multiple targets.

Many of the quirks and frustrations that you may only hit on a project-by-project basis are constantly raised and solved in the community, so you get a broader understanding of the issues currently faced in the JavaScript, Android, iOS, BlackBerry and various other development communities.

In your current work that may not be relevant, but as a side interest the depth and breadth of your understanding will be accelerated by osmosis within the Haxe community.

It represents more than many communities a bit of a campfire of programmers from different backgrounds who have a shared passion for games and apps. That enthusiasm can stir up your passion for programming if you find yourself in a bit of a language or framework rut.

It's still a small community, so that brings with it the usual frustrations, challenges, and opportunities. If you're a driven developer wanting to make an impact, there are a lot of low-hanging fruits in Haxe to be picked, so it's a good runway if you're wanting to build a personal brand.

There are also very interesting initiatives like HaxeNME that are threatening to break out from their niche, and in a multi-device world, it's starting to look like quite a compelling open source offering.
Only Google...
Is the risk any greater with APIs (like described in the article) compared to typical username/password login systems?
Google Faces – Searching Earth using facial detection
Well said. The post doesn't have to have an answer for everything to be interesting.

In the 0.1 post, she's quite clear about the limitations of the exercise: "I’m not trying to work out how easy or difficult it is for people or families who find themselves in this position — there are clearly a large number of concomitant challenges that I wouldn’t presume to be able to quantify or address."
Nop. It's wide open :) We have been focusing our marketing on Latin America but every day we see considerable growth in the number of users that come from Europe and Asia
No, war is mostly funded from printed money. No amount of taxation would fund such a waste of capital.
Pedals.io, the guitar effects app in the browser with online jamming
> btw: isn't the scheme you posted vulnerable to replay attacks too? Much easier than the timing attack.

Yep, probably. In fact now that I look at it definitely, I should have gone with that instead!

I forget who said this but basically any feature that exists in TLS that doesn't exist in your hand-rolled authentication scheme is a vulnerability.
I said that if you're trying to break into VC-istan when not yet established, you probably can't do that while raising kids. I said nothing about starting a company (possibly as a side project that turns into a lifestyle business) in general.
Yeah, now open the bottle, use about 1/8th of it a month for a couple months and see which goes bad faster. Also, Olive Oil isn't the only option here.

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.

I probably use more butter and rice bran oil than the others. Canola/vegetable oils are just not good for you, do some cursory searches. There are much better alternatives that aren't much more expensive over the course of a year.
BitTorrent Sync Is A Dropbox Killer, Or Maybe Much More Than That
Seems to me users would have access to the same Internet as you or me. They will be able to read about these issues, just the same as we can.
The ~9,000 people who knew to vote for collective bargaining power should not be punished by the ~11,000 short sighted ones.

Are you even capable of understanding that people have differences of opinions regarding the role of unions, government, etc.?
It's built on top of pedalboard.js, an open-source library at https://github.com/dashersw/pedalboard.js
Understand how Larry Page leads Google judging by what he says
The problem is that an increasing percentage of jobs in the economy are either zero-sum or positive sum but very competitive or winner-takes-all in nature. In such a situation, unilaterally choosing to take a vacation can be a death sentence. But if everyone takes a vacation, everyone could be better off.

I wouldn't be. I don't wanna trade money for vacation. I am young, immigrant, I wanna save up money, I don't wanna trade vacation time for my salary.

You can make your case if you want, but please avoid taking anonymous authority and say things like "if everyone takes a vacation, everyone could be better off, if we just used the government to force every employer to give everyone vacation time".
How is the shared secret generated, stored and shared? (There are lots of ways to do this wrong, and the code and algorithm for that were not even shown.)
Unless I'm missing something, the example code will just calculate the checksum of "key:value&key:value&key:value", so actually anything with the same number of parameters will pass.

Assuming "key:value" is supposed to read "#{key}:#{value}", this may be vulnerable to a delimiter attack -- you couldn't tell the difference between {foo: 'bar', bar: 'baz'} and {foo: 'bar&bar:baz'}.
The article is fairly light on technical details, however the signals will probably be some manner of 3G (or even LTE).
Exactly my feeling. I have only had bad experiences with the vWorker → Freelancer transition. In fact I felt it was engineered for only one simple reason: to get more "workers" to pay the monthly subscription fee.
So this founder managed to achieve a degree of success at this that most have not. Good for him.

I'd rather hear more from the larger majority of struggling founders with families, because chances are I have more in common with them. What's keeping them from succeeding and how did he avoid the things holding them back?

I suspect a zero-sum game is hiding in the relationship between this guy his non-founder employees, because I very rarely read about founders with young kids helping their employees in their struggle to raise a family under startup conditions.

There are family-friendly startup anecdotes out there, but family-friendly startups surely aren't the norm.
Again, this is the problem with your "VC-istan" term. I think you should stop using it, because it's helping you slink out of debates that you'd be better off losing. I'm sure there's some definition of "VC-istan" for which entry is foreclosed for new parents, but if you're referring to "first externally funded Silicon Valley startup", you're wrong.
In this case it sounds like the Grandma is playing Flash games online... Maybe a Chromebook would be a better option?
That's a great/alternative point of view for email marketing. Wonderful list of resources. Sometimes it is hard look from a different angle when you have a set of tools and principles but I guess it is good to keep an eye on other stuff every now and then.
Any demand for experienced java freelancers?
I recently started looking to do some java freelance work to make some cash on the side. I like to think I'm a pretty experienced dev. However, on freelance sites, it always seems like a race to the bottom. Where can I find jobs that require someone with an experienced/large skillset?
Very concise. Great!
I have the feeling that all the time you're putting to find a dev and even communicating here is more than what it would take "you" to execute.
However, I heard peopleperhour.com is good (very big in the UK).
Also, last week I met the founder of coworks.com
Still in beta but good concept: your connection share their freelancers and refer them. Good considering the overload of freelancers and high risk.
I'm bad at crypto. I'm well aware that I'm bad at crypto. In fact, I would venture to guess that I know next to nothing about it. The problem isn't that I don't know what I don't know...the problem is that I don't know what (or whom) I can trust. And that is the bigger problem with crypto.

It would be nice if we had resources that could tell us not only the best practices, but what their downfalls are and their relative difficulties of cracking. Some common sense tells me that there is a combination of techniques that are simple and robust enough that I would have to worry about phishing before I had to worry about better security. But I don't know what that combination is, and I don't know if I can trust anybody that tells me.
>Moving to or setting up a subsidiary in a different jurisdiction: Completely fine.

>Doing the same thing for the sole purpose of avoiding taxes: Not fine.

And how exactly do you propose to distinguish the two?

"Number of employees" is a completely worthless metric. Apple (and/or Foxconn) employs many times more employees in China than in the U.S., does that mean they should be reporting most of their profits in China?
My mother (in France) ended up with 8 weeks off, while the normal stuff is 5 weeks, because with time you're rewarded more days off. The other trick is that it is paid time off, you can still do overtime if you want to (there was even a tax break on overtime for a few years here). But as I said on another topic, since you're paid to work 218 days in the year as a software engineer (and not by the hour), overtime would mean working during the week-end. You can also do a good job and ask for a bigger salary.
It only works in Chrome right now, as Chrome is the only implementer of the full Web Audio API.
That image of the Google blimp almost looks like the logo was photoshopped on. Any way to tell if that's real or not?
The point is minimum wage workers are often not working 40 hours at any one job to begin with.
Incidentally, I also believe this is a powerful idea for other types of spam, including text message and Twitter spam, and ultimately, telemarketing spam.
How to make your site's footer impossible to reach.
My girlfriend just asked a question that had not even occurred to me: what happens during a storm? I am sure Google's engineers have a way to handle that, but I am genuinely curious about what their solution is.
I didn't know about Matasano's Crypto challenges. Looks like fun, going to give it a try!

http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/
Shipify: play themesongs on Spotify whenever you push code
I have implemented an MD5-based scheme similar to what was described. At the time, MD5/hash extension attacks were not as well-known as they are today, at least I had not heard of them and I read up on MD5 before I designed the sytem, so another worry is that what is considered secure today might not be secure tomorrow.
There is also a form of respect among writers, usually nices pieces don't get vandalised/overwritten. Hire or just ask actually good writers to make your trains less horrible looking and both parties would be happy. A lot of cities do that nowadays (for walls), at least where I live, and this has been quite a success.

I am not saying this will prevent the die hards who like the thrill of going into depots at 3am for a 15min job that most of the time ends up very poorly, but this would probably be more effective and cost way less than drones!
yes. these blimps must be providing links between APs on the ground, not direct connections to users.
Bitcoin is not mtgox or any other exchange. But to be fair, bitcoin itself had its share of security issues (fixed, but who knows what the future holds)
She could go to a totally different industry, but she'd be starting her career over again at the bottom.

She loves flying & traveling, so she'd probably want to go to another airline.

So why didn't your girlfriend research the industry she was going into? Just because she loves flying and traveling doesn't mean she had to make a career out of being a flight attendant.

And it's not like she was a the top of her "career" anyway as a flight attendant, so what's the big deal.

Your sense of entitlement is disturbing, but pretty common.
Author here. A good place to start (mentioned in the article).

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

Never met any of them in real life, but they seem like good people to me. I've actually used knowledge I picked up from those exercises to fix vulnerabilities in past clients code, and I'm not yet half-way through them.
That's far from true. Many end-users don't need to make significant changes. We've used a few themes successfully.

As an Android App developer, we don't even need a website - we just keep one up for our blog and basic product info. 90% of our communication goes through our apps & Gmail.
Service sector jobs like bank admin are only £1000 or so higher than that per annum.
The problem described was not that she wants to double tap and can't: it is that she double taps without meaning to. Telling her about pinch zoom won't change that.
Probably because JS can run directly in browsers, and can also be made into mobile/desktop apps with Webkit views.

Added bonus for JS is that many languages compile to it (CoffeeScript, LispyScript, ClojureScript, even Haxe, OCaml, Haskell, C++), DEs use it for scripting (Gnome, KDE, Windows 8).

I think it isn't more popular because it's associated with Flash, whereas JS is becoming the new default for the web.
Time and money are not fungible; no amount of money can create time. Even money and time off are not fungible, and, given the empirically demonstrated diminishing marginal effect on experienced utilit of additional income, it's highly unlikely that money could even compensate for the lost utility of less time off for most in the upper ranges of the middle class.
Even if we had such a language it would probably not be high level enough because understanding what security you know is still a hard problem. Instead I'd suggest a high level library that gives you a complete security package with defaults that can't be easily changed.

Something like what the CAESAR competition hopes to achieve: http://competitions.cr.yp.to/caesar.html
I completely agree with this and have just released a session-cache for python that completely ignores encryption and just stores uuid in a cookie, and relies on server side lookups for session work.
Bubble.

The dollar will collapse soon.
I agree with your post. I also disagree with PG's stance on needing to have a partner, someone to help you get through the tough times of a start-up. I have partners - a wife and four kids. They keep me going during tough times because I could not bear to let them down. They also keep me sane, because as you stated there is nothing quite like a shitty day at the office followed up by a young child that acts like your return from work is Christmas morning. Somehow when they exclaim "Daddy!" when I open the door, it makes most of the work problems instantly forgotten. This has a positive effect on my ability to deal with workplace stress.

I have also found it useful for framing priorities in my head, and even negotiating deals with suppliers. Having kids keeps my priorities straight. When I think about spending time or money, I think about the impact on my kids. I have told suppliers (I have a manufacturing company) "Every dollar I save, is another dollar I can put in my kids college fund". It has become a useful framework for negotiation. Every business trip is compared to time I won't be able to spend with the kids.

My wife got tenure and published her first book while working on a strict 40 hour schedule when we had our first kid. Now that we have four kids (9,6,3, and 2 months) she is working a strict 35 hour week and working on her second book. I find it an inspiration of what get done if you focus and have four little constraints running around.
I personally wouldn't do any medium-to-large JavaScript project in anything but Haxe at this point.

> I wonder why it's not more popular?

It's a relatively young language (8 years old, but it's only been mature for a fraction of that). I think it just hasn't reached critical mass yet.
How does any of that not apply to C++?
Nothing changed in my view about the relationship between outlining and general writing tools. Fargo is an almost exact clone of the outliner I created in 1987.

Here's something I wrote recently on the subject.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/april/outlinersAndWordPro...

I'm doing the best I can, I don't feel any animosity toward you, I don't know where that's coming from.

Peace..
No Octopress? Or do you consider it to Jekyl-like?
Even with those enhancements, C++ remains incredibly complex language, with such a great variety of features the learning curve would be rising very slowly over time.
ROFL. With dynamite?

Things are tough all over. Now that I apparently have your permission, maybe I'll go camp out in Bill Gates's back yard tonight and spotlight some deer.
You are of course correct. Thanks! Will fix and rollout once traffic from HN/reddit dies down.
Was Y2K overhyped, or was disaster successfully averted?
How much responsibility do you place on her for choosing a career with low mobility and high competition?
The difference between me and the other partners is mostly that I got to be publicly known by writing. On most topics there are other partners who can give better advice than me. PB gives better advice about hacking. Geoff gives better advice about b2b questions. Jessica is a better judge of people. Garry and Kevin are better on design. Sam Altman is better on fundraising. If I were hit by a bus tomorrow, YC would be pretty much as good as it is today.

This business is more naturally decentralized than a company like Apple. It consists mostly of individual conversations between founders and YC partners, and most of those conversations already don't include me.
For that matter, I'm a bit concerned about taking in nutrients on a per-day basis... I think having some thing to eat a few time a day is important, but that the nutrition can be averaged over a 3-4 day cycle.. you may get a bit more one thing one day, and another the next as long as it averages out.
The mandatory vacation is there to make sure the employee is well rested, efficient at his job and not incurring extra expenses by becoming prone to illness through overwork.
You assume that if there were no mandatory vacation laws your salary would be higher but that is highly unlikely - your taxes would be just as high (and in the long term probably even higher because of the side effects), paying to support social measures that improve the life of all citizens (e.g. - guaranteed healthcare).
Yep, I think it's photoshopped: http://www.flickr.com/photos/isafmedia/4995227882/
There haven't been many serious discussions about privacy or tracking in the US either. The only exceptions might be health data and some financial data, yet much of that information could probably be mined to, using data on purchases and online activity.

Here's [1] just one example of the type of thing that is easily possible. It meant that if you bought a new high end car during the last campaign you were likely to receive a direct mail solicitation for campaign contribution from one or both of the presidential candidates. Maybe that is good or maybe it is bad, but there have been few serious discussions, and during recent years the Supreme Court has declined to recognize most notions of any rights to privacy.

[1] http://buxtonco.com/industry-solutions/political/