skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEEKING FREELANCER

London, would prefer local, remote possible.

Looking for a WEB SECURITY EXPERT with strong experience in PHP/MySQL application security, vulnerability testing, security consultation, thorough appraisals, etc. with a keen eye for spotting potential risks.

Must be someone with rock-solid integrity (obviousy) and strong references to boot.

Short-term contract, any time between July 16th and 31st.

Please contact josscrowcroft [at] gmail if interested.

Thanks!
sqrrl, a venture-backed startup in Cambridge, MA, is building a secure, scalable platform for big data apps. The core of our platform is Apache Accumulo, the Hadoop-backed BigTable implementation open-sourced by the NSA.

We're always looking for developers with experience implementing search, analytics, and DBMS platforms. Our ideal candidates have a history of open source contributions and experience with the Hadoop stack, including Accumulo or other BigTable-derived systems like HBase, Cassandra, etc.

Right now we have a small (and growing) team of excellent engineers located in Kendall Square. Use our jobs page at http://www.sqrrl.com/jobs to apply!
>"but for a nice IDE you drop a well behaved git, and everything that goes with it."

?

What about Visual Studio makes git behave badly?
Yeah, gotta say if the world can make it work, but you can't, must be Microsoft's problem, right?

I'm guessing Microsoft isn't your problem.
It may be perceived to be spammy with the frequency of front-page posts, but the site is anything but "spam". I find the site quite useful.
EC2Box - A web-based multi-terminal ssh tool for your EC2 servers
For the EC2 users- Open multiple shells, share commands, upload files, store connection info. I hope someone finds it useful!

Demo: http://youtu.be/T4SBisCz91M
Code: https://github.com/skavanagh/EC2Box
Putin: Snowden must stop leaking secrets to stay
Designing Notifications
Most of these are not really applications, seems to be mostly just the equivalent of small adverts that would normally be a relatively cheap Flash page or Facebook app. Or they're just CDRom style multimedia experiences which we already know are not that profitable.
> Linux has nothing to do with whatever reasons

I think it is not about Linux in isolation, but about the fancy, over hyped tech stacks you see people using.

About 6 months ago I was having a few days off, out in the wilderness so to speak, I decided to try this whole Go thing. When reading about it, I thought nice I like the actor paradigm, I was doing a prime solver from someone's tutorial, and... It was slow. Not slow, slow, but slow.

Compared the same thing to a similar idea in C# in Rx and in TPL, and in F# and in CamelLight, with one in Java.

For my preference the syntax of C# was the best, and funnily enough the old fashioned style implementation I did in Java was the fastest, but not by much at all. Go was about 20% of the speed of the java one, not much faster than the CamlLight implementation.

This wasn't scientific, this wasn't a fair comparison, but I am cynical about the 'buzz' or hype for some of these frameworks.

People often view things like Node.js as free. Which isn't true when you are paying for the hardware it runs on. The 'cost' of C# or MS SQL server isn't just the Microsoft licenses either. You can't look at these things solely in isolation.

However its rather un-interesting to say that a behemoth and status quo are actually good options. 'new' things are much more interesting, so get spoken about a lot more, but I'd love to know something truly high scale, highly available in Node.js, and how much it has really cost them.
Security features for online rental market?
I'm working with a luxury goods company to help them launch an online rental site for their product line.

I know how the basic model works, but what security features would put in to keep my risk exposure down?

For example I could use address verification to match billing and shipping addresses.

Any suggestions would be useful :)
Yeah, that is the conclusion I have reached as well. Interestingly, some people are saying that iOS 7 presents a sort of second coming of that gold rush, but we'll see.
There's UC Browser. It probably uses IE's rendering engine since the big names (FF, Opera) are missing.

You can't have IE in Kid's Corner (the guest mode) so you'll want UC Browser as an alternative. There are also alternative phone dialers since you can't have the default phone dialer in Kid's Corner.
Cool. There's a few other companies attacking similar but unrelated verticals also in NYC.

Your post has pizazz, but it doesn't communicate to the CTO candidate what the day to day will look like. Otoh, many places that do CTO searches at your size have some amount of technical debt. I know a few folks who are great at removing technical debt.
Apple should institute an unpublished karma score for reviewers based on number of reviews, how long a user used the app prior to reviewing, etc and use it to weigh both visibility of the review and its contribution to the average score.
Montreal, QC, Canada - Outpost (INTERN, LOCAL OR REMOTE) - http://outpost.travel

We're super early stage (only 3 months in), a team of 2 (one dev, one business guy) and have attracted top VCs and Angels in Canada. We're in the process of raising our first round soon.

Outpost (http://outpost.travel) aggregates P2P listings, and shoves them into one website. Think KAYAK for P2P.

We're looking for a PHP developer (for crawling and scraping) and a Backbone.js engineer (for the frontend architect). You need to have an IQ of 190+ to join and willing to eat ramen everyday.
Movies for Makers - Batman Begins
It's not a one-time. It's a continual maintenance headache. JavaScript allows for much nicer user interfaces than anything HTML can provide. As for gracefully degradation, I don't have time to support people without JavaScript. The best I can do is prevent those people from ever logging in by requiring javascript on the login form and rendering the support links client side.
Slightly off topic, but when I saw the power distribution bus with nine different outputs for this tiny little thing, I contemplated that we've come a long way from when I was a kid and everything ran off a single 5 volt ttl bus. It seems the more people say analog is dead, and thats all I've heard my entire life, the more you actually need analog EEs.
I think that's a failing strategy. You can only trust that 'their' data is open as much as you trust 'them'.

This is the robustness principle (for API design/use ) applied. "Be lenient in what you accept from others, stringent in what you emit."

As applied to this case, it's "Be lenient in what you you expect reality is, but stringent in what you attempt to shift reality to."
With a cold cache The Verge takes under 7 seconds to display its homepage on my shitty 4Mbps home connection and under 4 seconds on a warm cache.
SwiftStack (http://swiftstack.com/jobs/) is hiring software developers at all levels of experience.

Why Join SwiftStack?

You’ll work on a product that touches millions of people’s lives even if they don’t know it. The number of businesses using OpenStack in general and Swift in particular grows and grows, and it includes big names that make products that are used by both your little brother and your grandmother. You’ll work on a product that makes core OpenStack technology accessible to businesses of all kinds.

You’ll get open-source experience in a big way. At SwiftStack, we’re committed to strong participation in the OpenStack ecosystem in general and to contribution to Swift in particular. You’ll be a contributor to one of the most important Open Source projects currently active.

You’ll confront interesting problems every day. Writing a system like Swift and building a software ecosystem to surround it is the road less traveled. We aren’t writing yet another glorified CMS or social app or phone game. Whether it’s figuring out better algorithms for data placement, confronting a firehose of monitoring data, or determining how to integrate most flexibly with customers’ systems, there are always new and unusual problems to solve.

Interested? Send us an email at jobs@swiftstack.com. Send us your github profile, your LinkedIn account, a link to your website – whatever will best display the work that you’ve done. Tell us in a few lines of text why you’re interested in SwiftStack, and why we’ll be interested in you. We’ll be back in touch shortly to get the conversation started.
but one instance on Amazon is not high availability.

The rest of your post could be read as apples with oranges, Charm was expensive because they made massive architectural mistakes. End of story.

This is not to say that what you are doing/saying is incorrect. Your stuff works and is able to cope with the load thrown at it on one server.

To be honest I'm quite mystified why startups boast about using n instances to serve a few thousand hits. Node, some python frameworks and ruby are ridiculously wasteful[1]. All it tells me is that you've not though about the best way to do things, you've just used the latest tools and smooshed them together. If you had to have more than one server to handle 2[2] tickets a minute and 1 hit a second on your website I'd be questioning your programming skill

The one thing I do take issue with is your implied claim of high availability. Hourly backups, and no hot spare or active active replication is not high availability. Yes you can rebuild an instance in 5 minutes, but only in best case, and you've still lost up to an hour's worth of user data (around 60 tickets). That is a commendable recovery rate, but its still downtime.

[1] depending on usage, of course.
[2] using stats from the article
Good idea (presuming it's relatively accurate). Can you show for multiple keywords, though?

And a little strange that Positionly doesn't have Google sign-on, though. I'd think that would be the first one to implement for such a service.
I posted this here a while back[0], and it speaks to what you are saying… Even I have been treated better by complete strangers in Northern Africa than I do in the US…

We can play all the PC games, but the undertones are pervasive as it always has been here…

In the words of Langston Hughes: "America never was America to me"

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5694314
Lisp Hackers: free collection of interviews from Lisp programmers
Firefox edges ahead of Chrome in performance, memory usage, startup time, reliability.
I'd say even more people back home felt that way. Things got really weird in 2008, with Shepard Fairey straight-facedly producing the same sort of propaganda he parodied with "Obey Giant".

TBH I regret not seeing it before. He gave off every whiff of a man who sought power for its own sake. But he was glib, he was black, and at the time he seemed better than the alternatives.
> When was the last time you have to re-authenticate on a native mobile app?

All the time. The Facebook android app is horrible.
I used Firefox since from the Firebird days until the memory bloat in 4.0 drove me to Chome. Now every time I try to go back, I find Firefox behind the competition. For example, when I loaded up FF to test out ASM.js, I found I was still on version 18 because your silent auto updater only works when you run as administrator. You expect all your users to run as root in 2013? Really?

OK cidadel under ASM.js was pretty cool and memory boat seemed under control. Nice job BTW! So I set FF as my default browser. Next day I come to HN and open some CSS3 hair demo in a new tab. Next thing I know my browser is completely unresponsive. Until I find the offending tab and close it. Back to multi-process Chrome as my default.

As a Mozillian can you please explain why Mozilla is wasting their resources trying to power budget phones with a bloated outdated browser? Fix your browser, and by then, maybe the mobile hardware will be fast enough to justify the performance hit from running everything inside a JavaScript VM.
I take a bit of issue with the editorial title on this post. Can someone please define "high-value app"?

I know on smartphones everything is an app, but these from Agant are mostly auxiliary content plays, interactive titles to accompany other printed work. I was reminded of the glory days of the CD-ROM browsing their portfolio. Content like this has often been beautiful and compelling, but rarely profitable.

The problem on the content front is that you are competing with (1) print / Kindle, (2) the huge library of existing movie and TV content already available for tablets and phones, and (3) the entire internet, where most of the content is free to the reader.

Most of the paid apps that do well add specific functionality to your phone: managing files in the cloud, controlling physical devices, exercise companions, etc. Often they are tied with hosted services: Evernote and Dropbox, for example.

For this reason, I'd imagine Agan saw bigger success with UK Train Times rather than Explore Shakespeare.
You Don’t Need Coursera to Get Started with Machine Learning
> Is the cookie's value mapped to some in-memory entry in the application server, is it stored in a database, etc?

Neither. At login the server signs the new session cookie with a secret application key. Later, when a client requests a page and sends over the session cookie, the server verifies the signature. If it matches, the data in the session cookie -- which usually includes the username, whether they're logged in, and for how long -- can be trusted.

This is nice because it makes scaling a stateful site easier. Server-side session stores often become the bottleneck. Also, from a REST standpoint, updating a session database during a GET request (eg to freshen the session) is problematic.

ASP.net was the first time I remember seeing the signed session cookie trick, but most web frameworks have it now:

django -- https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/sessions/#...

rails -- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html#session-storage

flask -- http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/api/#sessions

node -- https://github.com/mozilla/node-client-sessions

mojolicious -- http://toroid.org/ams/etc/mojolicious-session-cookies
Nothing particularly about Visual Studio, and I know msysgit does work, but it worked absolutely terribly back when I tried it. That wasn't intended to be a mark against Visual Studio in any way, I agree completely it's a very nice IDE and the statement about it maybe being the best in the world is probably quite defensible. I just don't think that alone is a good reason to ignore all the other things about the MS stack that don't compare well to the competition, and the first example that sprung to mind was real git vs msysgit.
Thanks for this nice article!

I've had a Windows 8 laptop with the support for built-in SRT/RST/AcronymSoup as it comes from ASUS/Intel, and I've been dragging my feet on setting up flashcache because 1) I don't know what I'm doing, and 2) I don't want to break the already existing Windows 8 support for this feature until I'm sure I can get the same benefits from the SSD in Linux.

Also, 3) I was pretty sure I would have to use flashcache because it seemed that nobody had written a good tutorial for any other method.

I just hate it when there's only one implementation of a new feature and it's not well-supported by the distribution.

I still haven't tried your tutorial but it looks like you've paid careful attention to all of the important details, like alignment and most importantly "what do I do when I don't want to have this on my filesystem anymore"

Much appreciated.
A lot of RFPs are going out now that require a clear plan to update and keep apps current in a cost effective manner. This could range from strategic use of HTML/cross-platform tech, or some form of retainer agreement.

That being said, many app builds that I see being put to tender (at least in the UK) are often 'one shot' in combination with an advertising campaign or marketing effort. For better or for worse, many builds aren't designed to be sustainable or have a long-term presence.
I feel the same, especially when I compare it to the business of developing / running a website:

- much lower barriers to entry (Apps are much less complex than websites that need to work on many different browsers, especially with iOS)

- micropayments are built-in, users will pay for additional content/features much more often

- scales much better (most of the functionality is in the client)

On the other hand, it's relatively unlikely that an App released today will work or be useful in 10 years - so it's an even faster market than websites.
Author Jack Goldsmith was in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bush, and was present at the dramatic hospital room confrontation with Ashcroft.
How we are losing the war for the free and open internet
And the list seems to be missing the most important point.

The .Net Framework is extremely powerful and extensive.

The number of problems the framework has prevented me from needing to solve is staggering. We get work done here, fast.

Eg. Recently I had to convert times from any random time zone into another random timezone accounting for daylight savings etc. I cannot imagine having to solve that problem in just about any other language suggested in this comment section.
Im sure PG is right on this for the most part, but some days I am un-optimistic about this. It seems like the big tech companies will cannibalize (buy out/take the talent off the market) or move into the same space as a startup that has validated the market for them.

Google is the best example here. They are across so many markets (payments, local, social, mobile, video, cloud storage, big data, cloud computing, ad's, etc, etc).

Sure Google are cutting services left and right atm (rss, google+ games) but then they just spread the empire further by moving into more new territory they really don't have any business in (eg Google Keep, competing with Evernote).

People talk about Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook all having more or less all the same competing products and services. Ie, all in social, mobile, etc.

I bet there is not one start-up starting today who is not the least bit worried about being crushed by one of the above tech giants should they want to move into the same space.

I mean, I do truly hope we are not moving towards the William Gibson Dystopian "Megacorp" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacorporation but some days it seems that's what we could be heading towards if we didn't have any anti-trust laws in place.

Sure, the big corps, are going to become more agile, module and Startup-like. But they are still ultra powerful and not everyone wants to build a accusation target.

(yes I am aware there is still probably thousands of niches/areas where you can be competitive)
Now the developer is king
To be honest, as a Java veteran, there is very little XML any more apart from a bit of Tomcat config usually. It's all gone in favor of annotations which are much better.

It ain't J2EE 1.4 days any more (thank fuck).

The only thing I've done involving XML recently was setting tomcat 7 to serve a war file from the root site and that took about 2 minutes to work out.
Theft sucks too and one shouldn't take that too hard either. Surely you don't advocate that the best approach in life is to take everything really hard? It's beneficial to not take something too hard while taking positive steps to correct the undesirable situation.

(And please don't compare a bad app store review to murder. A little perspective is a healthy thing.)
A future made of Glass
The break-even point for Strassen's algorithm is not unrealistic -- it is around the 1000x1000 range. You might be thinking of the best known algorithms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppersmith-Winograd_algorithm

Strassen's algorithm is certainly used in practice.
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will@willholloway.net
>"On the other hand, if you build your apps around a horizontally scalable storage solution"

I'm assuming you're talking specifically about Sql Server because there is no technical reason you can't use MS tech with Node, Mongo or MySql.

What about Sql Server doesn't scale horizontally?

Sql Server was scaling horizontally in the enterprise space since 2005.

And also, all the fancy middleware ( memcache, lucene, whatever ) that we put in front of MySql to scale it these days work just fine with Sql Server.
--
Name
Email: foo@bar.com
PGP Key ID: XXXXXXXX

Please do not send me anything unencrypted that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.
No, we're are using a Microsoft stack - ASP.NET MVC and Sql Server.

We're not actually using Node.js in that sense. I was just pointing out that it works well (we use Node and npm to run the coffeescript compiler - that's it)
Yeah, I'm quite sure Sadam Hussain would agree with you but unfortunately he lost his head when the US government decided it didn't like him as much as it used to.

It is very naive to not understand that the leader of the US has a large impact on the world at large. Having an administration who have all but said that foreigners do not have any rights isn't good for anyone.
Technologists Wanted to Create New Apps for Our Cities!

Are you a hacker with a huge heart? Code for America is looking for developers, designers, researchers, and product managers for its 2014 Fellowship.

If you want to make a difference while doing what you love to do, this is your chance — build apps that help municipal governments work better.

Cities are under greater pressure than ever, struggling with budget cuts and outdated technology. That’s why Code for America is connecting talented technologists with municipal governments to create and implement new web apps and explore new ways of resolving local challenges.

During previous years fellows have tackled problems such as criminal justice in NYC, economic development in Santa Cruz, Calif., and 311 in Chicago.

CfA fellows come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences from high-profile positions at Google, Apple, and Microsoft to smaller startups to municipal government.

Why Become a CfA Fellow?
- Gov 2.0 Training. You will start with a crash course in municipal government and gain practical understanding of the vital intersection of government and technology.
- Connections. The biggest names in the tech industry and the Gov 2.0 movement will provide you with unparalleled networking, mentoring, and support.
Professional Development. You will develop lasting relationships, learn new skills and languages in a fast-paced, startup atmosphere.
- Autonomy. Working in small teams with talented individuals you’ll decide what you build and how you build it — from start to finish.
- A Labor of Love. You’ll not only accomplish a lot and make the world a better place, but you’ll have a lot of fun working with other passionate people.

Applications are being accepted until July 31, 2013. This is an 11-month, full-time fellowship located in San Francisco. See http://codeforamerica.org/fellows for more information.

Apply online at: codeforamerica.org/apply
Demo: http://youtu.be/T4SBisCz91M