skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
George W. Bush on Mandela, Snowden and his legacy
ShowHN: wmake - generate a makefile for your webapps
Successful products use their capital to invest in future markets. By one of the biggest online radio platforms spending the money, time and resource to develop for Windows Phone 8, one can only assume that it must be seen as a competitor to the current big hitters. Just look at Telefónica's recent investments.
Everywhere you turn, there's an article about hacking, or spying or big-data, or privacy or another data breach. Obama actually called out cyberwars in his state of the union message, and virtually every fortune 500 has open positions on their security teams.

Get into InfoSec ... as a generalist: CISSP, CISM, as a specialist, GIAC, CRISC, etc.

I worked crypto/comms for DOD, and this was a natural for me.

Best of luck,
"Making an interface work with and without Javascript takes more time"

It should be a one-time cost if your design is not broken somewhere. There is not a lot of functionality that requires Javascript. I understand that having an in-browser spreadsheet automatically update cells as things change is going to be tough without Javascript, but that does not excuse the more basic things people use Javascript for: form submission, hyperlinks, loading text, etc. Your design is flawed, at a fundamental level, if you need to do a large amount of extra work to have this basic functionality work without Javascript.

Really though, in an age of web toolkits and large frameworks for creating pages with all this Javascript, there should not be any need to make such a choice. Whatever you are building your website on should already support a non-Javascript version; the only real issue is when you need to do something that is not already part of that toolkit. Again, I understand that sometimes Javascript really does make a particular feature of a website possible, but I am asserting that the vast majority of Javascript out there has nothing to do with such features.

"Surely it's up to the team working on it to decide if that time is better spent on something else?"

Users have to deal with the consequences of those decisions. If I cannot pay my hospital bill without enabling Javascript, then I have to enable Javascript -- regardless of my reasons for disabling it (and if for some reason I cannot enable Javascript at all, I cannot pay my hospital bill). Whitelists are not really a great solution; any NoScript user has surely had to play the "enable Javascript here, here, here, and here" game, trying to guess which scripts are important for a website to function and which are malicious advertiser scripts.
Why would Country A ever care what Country B thinks about their leader? This would only ever be an issue if it was stopping a leader getting their foreign policy objectives achieved.

Germans would want the US leader that has the most benefit for Germany, not the US.
ShowHN: A Realtime Social Newspaper
Seems like the author forgot to learn the conventions of the language. The site looks like a good reference though
If it wasn't for Reagan, Germany would still be two countries.
Well, they fail miserably then.
Really?! The gist was that Android was more like eventually open, because real development lags behind the OSS version?
Its not the end of your dreams, just different. Mobile apps stores are the exact same marketplace and business trajectory as cdrom multimedia in the early/mid 90s. I'm sure they'll be another, probably unpredictable tech driven bubble in the future. The endless wheel of IT keeps on turning and something else will rotate up soon enough.

"I can't imagine that there wasn't enough good work out there"

Toward the end of a bubble the work goes away no matter how good you are. As far as I know he was pretty good. Which has pretty dire implications for the rest of the marketplace. The worlds best finish carpenter got fired in 2007. The worlds best multimedia cdrom designer got fired around 1996ish. The world best atari 2600 programmer got fired in 1983ish. Its the bubble that caused the problem, not the man.
This is rather silly. You could repeal the internet but it still wouldn't stop "cyber warfare". Viruses and data leaks both happened without the help of the internet.
Where can you get 6 linux vps for free? And why would you use 6 VPS as opposed to one?
"The best you can do is throw up a noscript message explaining why your app needs JavaScript."

Unfortunately, this is almost always a message explaining that your website demands Javascript, without an explanation as to why. I have yet to see the noscript message that says, "We only had time to create one version of the website, and we are too busy doing other things to create a non-Javascript version." I am not even sure what sort of technical reason could be given for requiring Javascript for form submissions or hyperlink functionality...
Lots of terrific advice here, and I myself am mostly a self-taught programmer, I've only taken 3 formal courses, all introductory. I'd only add:

"Maybe I would be confident in my skills to apply to some tech jobs. Or do some freelance work"

Don't expect to get "normal" tech jobs by the time you're good enough unless you can disguise your age, age discrimination is fierce in this field. But as noted by you and many others, there are many options.

I'd also add that at some point unless you've forgotten all your math and don't want to refresh it try Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of..., http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...), everything you need is free and online. If it's a good enough fit for you it will teach you some foundational things that'll make you a better all around programmer and system designer. E.g. one way or another learn big O notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation) and its significance.

Over time, get some breath. In my book that means try to learn the basics of these languages and concepts and their typical environments: Lisp and recursion (see SICP above, or alternatives on the Wikpedia page plus http://www.amazon.com/The-Little-Schemer-4th-Edition/dp/0262... specifically for recursion), C and pointers, HTML, Javascript and browser programming, and some database work, SQL/RDBMS preferred, I recommend PostgreSQL over any of the MySQL variants, but a simple key/value store or embedded SQL database would also get your feet wet. If you learn recursion and pointers you'll be way ahead of most people who believe themselves to be programmers.

Good luck!
Is "Box" the one from Logan's Run? Or is there a different one?

(Weapons-Based | Powered Prostheses | Physically Bonded Robot)
Learn Dart in minutes
> since I already store sha256

Storing SHA-256 of passwords is a bad idea. You should use either scrypt, bcrypt, or at the very least PBDKF2 (with a large number of rounds).

For a signed token round tripped to the client you should use an HMAC[1].

[1]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash-based_message_authentica...
San Mateo (San Francisco Bay Area), California

Coupa Software - Procurement and Spend Management for business, in the cloud.

Looking for...

- Ruby on Rails developers
- iOS developers
- integrations engineer (connecting enterprise financial systems)
- UX & visual designers

Our product is built on Rails, and helps businesses save money, and helps all of their people who do purchasing and expenses to have much more efficient and enjoyable jobs. Our customers love our product, because we work extremely hard on to improve and protect the user experience, design, and overall coherence of the product.

Current goals and challenges include building new features, improving our automated testing, and maintaining a solid foundation for the product. Your workload in a given month might include bugs, a feature or three to build by yourself or with a few others, improving our technology stack, or implementing your own ideas to improve the product. We like people who are full stack, and like learning about all areas of the product.

I am a full-stack dev, so I do everything from tuning database queries to Rails to JavaScript to visual design on my features, its pretty damn rewarding and interesting.

Working on the product development team is pretty great. I enjoy working and spending time with everyone on the team, and we have smart people from lots of different backgrounds and locations. We have a neat office space in downtown San Mateo that is open and perfect for a team of programmers (we keep the noise down when we're working). We are two blocks from the San Mateo CalTrain station, we have plenty of room for bikes, and free parking passes if you want to drive.

We have had remote developers for a long time, across the country and world. We also allow for working from home as needed for local people (or wherever else you are productive), and we strongly encourage people to go home and rest if they look tired or don't feel well.

We offer good pay, great health / dental / vision insurance, unlimited vacation, extremely flexible hours (pretty much be in by 11am if you are local). We have "field trip" lunches on Wednesdays to get the team together and relax, and other days we might walk to the park or somewhere downtown for lunch.

Please email a quick intro and your resume, website, or github to * brianfarr@gmail.com * if you are interested or have any questions.

If you seem like a good possibility, your resume will be seen by my manager and the team early this week. If not, I will try my best to point you to someplace you are a good fit, or connect you with recruiters I know. Also, if you are new or looking to move to the SF Bay Area and want to talk to someone who did it last year, from the midwest, send me an email too.

(P.S. - We have already hired one Rails engineer from an HN Who's Hiring post).
Translation: "Get off my lawn!"
An annoying JavaScript quirk
What's awful is that the update reportedly enables JS even if you had previously disabled it, though I doubt this was intentional.
I assume Chrome already does this. If JS is not even executed, there is no reason to request files in script tags. I do not hate JS, I just dont care about it, same thing as Java Applets.
Why do some people just love locking themselves into closed platforms?
It depends on the technology stack that you're using. If your apps are .Net/CLR-based, it's very possible to get the separation that you're looking for. On Unix this is done all of the time with JVM-based apps as well.

End of the day scaling horizontally or vertically requires real engineering and operational discipline. I am seeing much more sloppy horizontal scaling than I used to, because the marginal cost of a VM is so low.

The difference is, when scaling up everyone intuitively understood that many services on one OS instance introduced risk. When scaling out, I think people with weak ops backgrounds intuitively feel that the OS instances are giving them a security barrier. That's a dangerous assumption!

The simplicity of spinning a VM is obscuring the complexity of the system as a whole.
SEEKING WORK - Maryland or remote

Backend focused full stack developer. Specialize in PHP and SQL with solid architecture and general knowledge.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/lukewelling

email: luke (at) lukewelling.com
Genius is eternal patience: Michelangelo
For me, I've never had any serious issues like that. BT Sync has been a little finicky in some cases and it looks like some files don't get synced over, but it does work relatively well.
Well, that was the ticket he tried to run on.
I agree, WiX is today's version of GeoCities... with Flash or HTML5 - desktop publishing for the web.

It's full of interesting content - a lot of photos, unsurprisingly!
See my comment below. I don't advocate any definition of "ownership". Call it however you want. It is you, not me who is using those concepts when you tell me that some group of people have some sort of agreement by which I must pay taxes, use certain paper bills as a legal tender etc. I am only saying that if I don't hurt anyone and do not want to participate in certain activities, what is the justification for violent action against me?

So please explain what you meant by your original comment.
Show HN: See how much traffic you can get from Google
Surely, if you've read the presentation and the agenda is kept strict and the content isn't relevant then you don't attend the meeting. Or at least you say to your boss - or whoever is demanding attendance - that your attendance is not productive use of your time.
chickens was also a valid token.
SEEKING WORK

Ryan Toronto - New York City and Remote

I'm a consultant from NYC interested solving business problems with the right technologies and processes. I have 15 years of experience in a number of spaces. I enjoy ideas and practices from Agile and Lean Startup. In the past I've co-founded a successful startup and lead small development teams.

Backend: Ruby/Rails, Node, PHP

Front End: EmberJS, Backbone, jQuery, Bootstrap, Foundation, SCSS

Ops: AWS/EC2, Apache, Nginx, Passenger, Postgres, MySQL, Redis

Architecture: Full stack, API design, SOA

I'm available for both development and training.

Feel free to email me ryanto@gmail.com
My favorite:

Open-Window Man

Power: Open Any Window
I did read them, and I did consider them. After thinking up a reply as why you think basic client display capability querying mechanisms are inappropriate, I decided you were most likely being sarcastic.

On (multiple) repeated readings, I'm not really sure you were intending to make a point one way or the other. If I attribute the second sentence of It IS effective in the sense that running no javascript really limits the amount of information people can learn about your system. Like, why should a website be able to learn about the size of my screen, the complete enumeration of all of my plugins and fonts, etc? to your voice, then it seems you are. If that's to be taken as the user's voice as rationale as to why JS doesn't need to be enabled, then it's fairly neutral.

At this point, with your reply taken into consideration, I'm confused. Feel free to elaborate.

> If ... you are doing Internet wrong

Well, my first sentence was actually asking you, since I wasn't sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_site_scripting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking

It is definitely problematic for me to have Javascript running from arbitrary untrusted sources.
It would be more enlightening and people might agree with you if you told us what was going wrong to cause you such pain?

I have had many windows servers and often you can almost just forget about them entirely once they're setup, which takes all of like 2 hours even if you're using a whole new stack.
Indian reservations
Reminder: Today is the last day for Google Reader
I remember when Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize based on the promise of him bring peace rather an actual accomplishment. It makes it almost laughable that his government has caused so much distrust amongst other nations.
How is this 3d? You can only go in two dimensions. It doesn't generate obstacles or even hills...

Don't get me wrong, it looks cool. I just don't understand why people are using the term 3D.
San Francisco, CA - Zenbox. Software Engineer. [LOCAL]

We're a YC company wrangling SaaS to work together (as they should), starting by bringing the biggest apps our customers use right into Gmail.

We work with dozens of API's to show our users profiles of their customers without having to jump out of the email flow - imagine having http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtzqRSlgqkw available when helping customers.

Thousands of people use it every day for hours on end, and are happy to pay for it to make sure they can continue using it. But there's still so much polish and improvement possible.

Looking for an engineer who loves the craft, who cares about building product, and is excited about helping customers.

We also explore some pretty awesome ways to escape from getting crushed under the heel of complexity, and we're all excited to start toying around with ideas like http://clojure.com/blog/2013/06/28/clojure-core-async-channe... for the frontend.

This is both UI and backend work.

Languages: Clojure, Clojurescript, Ruby, Javascript.

sean @ zenboxapp

https://www.zenboxapp.com
A big counterpoint to this is that app profits likely won't justify big consulting firm rates. When clients realize how fast and cheaply they need to build and update their apps to keep up, paying Deloitte to maintain it will quickly become unrealistic.
Share your infrastructure win a prize
The price of marijuana legalization
Just a few points:

1) If traffic is low enough, you can fit 100+ different apps on 8GB of RAM, regardless of tech.

2) Hourly backups are better than nothing, but not good enough if you want to make claims of durability and/or high availability.

3) BizSpark is more or less a loophole (they don't always accept), and when they do, you have to hope you go out of business w/in 5 years or never make more than $1M in revenue, or you're out.

4) Snarky comments about what the "cool kids" are doing hardly (in)validates anything.

5) If you enjoy the Microsoft stack and it works for you, then awesome. We're developers and should enjoy what we work on day in and day out.

6) My current projects have me bouncing back and forth between Node.js and .NET on a daily basis. Aside from getting an order of magnitude more enjoyment from developing w/ node, I'll also add that our node servers (plural) have been running for ~2 years for a total cost that isn't even approaching the cost of my Visual Studio license. If that makes me a "cool kid", then I'll rock that sag all the way to the bank (if cool kids are still sagging, that is).
We're working on a system called Trecul [1]. If you're coming from Haskell, I'm sorry to say I doubt it would be to your liking. Right now we're spending most of our time migrating off Akamai infrastructure but pretty soon that will be done and we can give Trecul some love.

The code is open source but we've got almost no docs. We'll have to fix that eventually.

[1] https://github.com/akamai-tech/trecul/
"Its"!
Travelers - Hartford CT

As an Automation Engineer you will work as part of a team responsible for developing automation solutions for Travelers. In this position you will develop and maintain automation infrastructure and scripts, author and maintain documentation for the infrastructure, and work with other engineers to gather requirements for new solutions. A successful Automation Engineer is creative, team-oriented, technology savvy, and driven to produce results. This discipline requires a combination of software development and testing skills.

Qualifications:

• Strong understanding and ability to apply concepts related to computer architecture, data structures and standard programming practices.
• Experience with Enterprise automation and administration tools: BMC Atrium Orchestrator, Microsoft Orchestrator, Microsoft System Center Config Manager, etc
• Experience programming in at least one major scripting language: Python, Perl, etc
• Strong oral and written communication skills are essential.
• Experience developing automated tests and automation infrastructure.
• Experience using more than one OS platform. (Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.)
• Ability to work collaboratively within a team of other engineers
How to secretly talk in the age wiretaps.
For every message you need 4 phones, 2 from you, and 2 for the other person.
Prefferably those are not your phones, but rather public phones
And you dont call / recieve from the same locations, prefferable different cities.

To transmit a message write out your text first
Use a simple scheme like 1 - 3 - 5 - 7 - 9 or 1 2 - 3 4 - 5 6 - 7 8 /..etc
Each individual text would harmless, (you might use a code book also for some words).
Now these texts would only start to mean somethng if, you combined the words from the conversations
So you replace words at 1 - 3- 7 - 7, with the words from the other conversation.

Such conversations are very hard to crack, the reasons why.
- they dont know the scheme you where using
- they dont know the codebook you where using.
- it is simply unposible to check every phone call on earth and mix it with another call.
the total sum of possible combinations = n * n-1 and thats just to much for any computer to check
There's an interesting gold rush analogy that in real world gold rushes only a small number of early adopters make any real money, but the support staff dragged along by the me-toos has a much longer and more profitable run. You wanna be the gold rush equivalent of the old prospector now running a general store, land agent, and saloon. Teach training classes, .edu market, tools ...

Repeated past observations imply that years after the bubble pops they'll still be .edu's offering classes to prepare noobs into the bubble, which no longer exists anymore.
They said the sequester would be scary. Mostly, they were wrong
His point is, it's dirt cheap to do any solution, and all that matters to the customer is customer value, assuming you are on a platform that can deliver on the "ilitys" (maintainab-, reliab-, supportab-, etc.), which Microsoft can.

The thing he doesn't point out is how much cheaper it would be if he dumped the VM and went with Windows Azure Cloud Services.
Yeah, not to mention I am sure he could run C#Mono/MySQL/Linux on one server as well...
JOB TITLE: Application Software Developer

LOCATION: Telecommute, Petaluma, San Francisco, Vancouver (Canada)

DEPARTMENT: Engineering

SUMMARY

As an application software developer at Cyan you work in an agile development environment and thus are enabled to make an immediate contribution to our products and customers. Newly developed features could be released to a live production site in a matter of days. We are looking for smart people to solve hard problems. You will handle a wide array of tasks ranging from prototyping new techniques and technologies, to developing test automation, and supporting our growing customer base. You are expected to write quality code with high availability for large-scale applications in a carrier-class networking environment. You will have the opportunity to work with newer technologies including Python/Django, Graph/NoSQL Databases, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and HTML5.

EXPERIENCE / SKILLS DESIRED

Cyan is looking to hire numerous developers with varying experience levels. Please apply if you satisfy most of the following:

A solid foundation in computer science, with strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, and software design
Experience with both static language (e.g. C/C++/C#/Java) and dynamic languages (e.g. Python/Ruby/Perl/Lisp/JavaScript)
Experience with programming in Linux
Experience in large systems software development or client application development
Experience with database systems and multi-threaded / multi-process applications
Proficiency in web server architectures is desired
Experience in an Agile Development Methodology is desired

Employment Visa Status: Candidates currently authorized to work in the US are encouraged to apply.

Contact jobs[at]cyaninc.com or visit http://www.cyaninc.com/

Thank you for your interest!
The web is 8000 days old today
Techempower's benchmark's paint a different story than you describe. Node.js seems to be the fastest. ASP.NET MVC shows some strong performance in a handful of database tests but when it comes things like json serialization etc it falls behind the competition.

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r5&f=ug-...

Edit: FWIW it doesn't test Microsoft SQL Server. Still, for most simple-ish web applications I can't imagine MSSQL server being significantly faster than Postgres or MySQL. Its selling point is really its feature set as opposed to its performance anyway.
this. I came here to point that out. How about something like:

CoderPad allows you to instantly evaluate a candidate's abilities without paying for an expensive on-site interview.