skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is everyone thinks they have a library that does crypto for them --- OpenSSL or CryptoAPI. But that's not what they have. They have the moral equivalent of a small pebble bed reactor, and they're strapping it to the tops of their electric cars and hoping to go for a drive.

Keyczar and cryptlib are two libraries that offer a high-level interface that is deliberately hard to screw up. But Google Keyczar is very new (it recently had a really horrible flaw) and cryptlib is not free unless you GPL your code.
Pending home sales soar 6.7 pct in April
I don't think that's using statistics disingenuously; It is a fact that the top 1% covers 40% of the federal government's expenses. Even though the actual income tax rate has decreased they are still footing a huge portion of the bill, and it relates to the sentence after that where she says:"Yet President Barack Obama has made it clear he would like to see the rich pay a greater share." At some point no matter how rich someone is you have to say they've paid enough; I personally think it's a travesty that so much of the budget is paid for by so few.
Her ideas is not the problem, her reason for them is.
If you right-click the turbo icon in the bottom left corner there's a config menu where you can choose the Auto mode.

I'm on a fast connection, but I noticed that sometimes it still compresses pages. Not sure how effective it is, but worth trying.
Algorithm for Incremental String Search
Good Move, that should end the questions about money in fb.
Discount contact lenses in Australia
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No, she doesn't. She ignores the entire situation which makes her reasoning suspect. So now you have a bunch of trust fund babies running around blathering about Ayn Rand and how they are the backbone of society because they have money, and if they have money then they must be worthy of having money because money is earned through being a productive member of society.

By ignoring "lucky money", she creates a logical loop in which money becomes a marker for productivity. The more money you have, obviously the more productive you are, because there are no productive poor.

It is also the problem of equating money with wealth. Money is just a good faith token between parties to expand the barter system to people who would otherwise have no basis to barter. For example, I am a software developer. I need a plumber. The plumber does not need software developed. Now, I can initiate a whole chain of exchanges that winds up with me having something the plumber wants, but that is inconvenient for day to day living. To short circuit all of that I give him a number of markers equal to the value we place on his time.

The markers aren't the point. That's the problem we have. We are emphasizing these markers and ignoring actual production. In a true idealized society based upon actual utility and such as Rand would have it, it would not be the scientists, artists, and executives at the top of the heap, but the electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and other doers and makers as they possess the skills of making.

Atlas shrugged is just CEO porn.
IBM Supercomputer to Compete on Jeopardy
Awesome! I have 2 cats, a hamster, and fish. The cats are primarily in charge of waking me up as they begin meowing or playing by the bedroom door at 6:30am. My job then, is to wake the GF up. It's a good team effort imo :-)
Confidential list of US nuke sites ends up on Wikileaks
Document available from Wikileaks here http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Obama_IAEA_nuclear_sites_declarati...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638531

Gotta love putting a lot of effort into an HN comment thread on a submission that ends up flagged. =)
How 99designs Built A Successful Business in 16 Months.
I'm not sure you're getting the point of measuring taxes on income instead of on income earners--as a reductio ad absurdum, if the top 1% took in 99% of the income, and the total tax burden were a substantial portion of the total income, the top 1% would have to shoulder a significant portion of the tax burden. But any extended discussion along these lines really should move to http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/8p79k/rands_atlas_...
Yes and yes. It's not to be taken as a general bible, but contains some insightful truths drawn from hugely successful startups. Very well written (guy has a PhD in literature.)

See also "The Innovator's Dilemma" for an insightful academic treatment (compellingly researched, but also less practical) of the same idea of disruption, though mainly for large corporations.
I want to setup my own browsershots farm, so it will be fast and local. I'm not as interested in cross browser rendering as I am in crossbrowser js testing.
oh my god, a puppy - how awesome ! You must be so happy !

My alarm goat is set to go off at 5.45 each morning. I'm so glad I bought one. I feel like my life is so much more organised and I'm just so motivated to get up and go, go, go!

I'm so wrapped up in my goat world that I don't care that it stinks and makes a mess of my house. I let it sleep with me even though it has traces of shit all over its fur and legs. They are so just so adorable.
Zimbabwe, above, is actually correct in that she does not ignore the situation. Rand looks down upon such monied-without-effort people, but offers no useful solution.

Also, I don't understand how people so readily apply vast utilities to carpenters and plumbers, but not business process managers and leaders who make a business vastly more efficient and productive. Is it because value creation that can't immediately be felt (it's not a fixed leak in a faucet) is beyond the capacity of most to imagine? It completely ignores the amount of operational leverage that such improvements have in large enterprises.

Not to say there aren't plenty of people who make plenty of money while providing questionable value creation.
The only advice I can offer is to keep as much code gui-agnostic as possible. The usual advice, really, just applied to javascript. Then you can use something like http://jsunity.com/ to test most of it. Gui testing is inevitably harder anyway, even if there are tools.
Java to get more modular with JDK 7 upgrade
> And, if concepts like Ubiquity take hold the
> web may break free of the browser entirely.

Grammar aside, since when does Mozilla Ubiquity intend to break free from the browser??

I wish I could vote this post down.
Ask HN: Review my app. Set Reminders in human language on Twitter
A few years back China was banning certain Google web properties. Then once Baidu.com got its feet off the ground and with some government subsidy became the more popular search engine in China, they un-did the blocking of those Google sites. I wonder why?
Looking down upon is not the same as addressing the issue. If that were the case, there wouldn't be any homeless, ever. It's almost an aside. "Oh yeah, those people are a total refutation of all my points. Let me continue ego stroking now and hope everyone ignores them too, because the answer is to do the very things I'm claiming to be against."

I attribute vast utility to carpenters and plumbers, because without them you don't have a house. Whereas without business leaders, we still have houses. At the end of the day, you need people to do more than you need people to manage.
Super distribution may be upon us
Yes; I should've specified that you should use the highest-level well-tested library that does what you want. The libs you listed (in the blog post) are definitely best-in-class for that purpose.
A “young, cool-people’s” coffee shop on the first floor of an old office building in downtown Chicago.

A place like this exists? All I can think of is Intelligensia.
Researchers Invent Eye-Tracking Eyeglass Display
>No matter how tired your hands get, you keep on going.

>You know it's going to be messy, but you can always clean it up later.

I don't mean to insult you by sounding like the notorious Clippy here, but did you mean. . . hacking is like masturbating?
Ah. Garbage collection for file systems. With screaming, to boot.

Wasn't some work done on log-structured file systems done by DEC some time ago? I can't find a reference to it.
Just because you're paranoid...

This sort of validates their point, doesn't it? They let one guy in to look around, and next thing you know he's back in the US, annotating satellite maps in his spare time. Looking at it from their point of view, the rest of the world really is out to get them.
Right you are, sir.
I remember pair programming once. It was great -- we did a day's worth of work in two weeks, agreed on all the variable names, and were really sure that 2 plus 2 was 4.
You know you've made it when you're banned in China.
It's a Louis CK bit, and an inside joke because the bit does match up with Intelligentsia (there's actually one of those in LA, where LCK wrote the bit, so I've always wondered).

Our office is in fact a few floors up from the Intelligentsia in the Monadnock building.
I agree that the physical printing of news on paper is becoming quaint, but having less print isn't what worries me, it's having less news.

I want to read stories about events all over the world and their meanings, context and history. I want those stories to be written by experts whose full-time job is tracking those stories down and explaining them to me. People like that have to get paid, and it's not clear yet how that's going to happen in the post-newspaper future.

There's always a demand for this sort of news, so I'm sure new businesses will spring up in the future to supply it to me. But it's going to be an annoying few years while it gets sorted out.
Towards a django.contrib.site_search (part 1)
Once you have the Flash VM installed it's about as cross-browser as they come.
Like I said: Don't vote it up then. Deleting it accomplishes nothing.
As far as doing it wrong can we go back to "app ‘A’ set a cookie with your account ID in it" and discuss why on Earth the app works like that???
Intriguing headline, article delivers -- exploding drink! Although I wonder if when the ice melts just enough to expose a small part of the Mentos if it'll only fizz a little, and then only slowly start to overflow, rather than explode.

In any case its a simple fun party trick. I'll have to give it a go.
This is powerful, and I believe that the revenue stream will ultimately make up far more than one third of the firm's total sales as the article suggests.

Peer to peer commerce relies heavily on social networks to guarantee quality of goods, delivery, and payment. Taking the social graph of FB and layering its own payment system would allow a big opportunity for improvement in peer to peer commerce. Imagine that you need to buy a used item, say a couch, but like many people you're concerned about buying from a random person on Craigslist. With this, you could search for a couch among your social network plus one or two degrees, and FB would take care of payment. The quality of purchase would be supported by the existing physical social network outside of FB, but mapped out inside FB.

Honestly, I could see this becoming a major competitor, at least in some respects, to what eBay was supposed to do but has started to ignore (peer to peer auctions).

Much more exciting to observe than them trying to monetize ad space.
"Never get involved in a land war in Asia"
An inside look at Heyzap
Enterprise software is bad because the people that takes decisions and the people that're going to actually use the program are different and in many ways they have opposite interests.

A little old but relevant:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
What it accomplishes is making a clear statement that this sort of material does not belong on this site, and people who are only interested in politics, economics, and similar topics (rather than hacking/startups) would do well to find another place to chat about them.
Things to do before you Die
Isn't the whole problem in this situation that you are trusting the client with critical data? He takes possession of it, has unlimited time and opportunity to work on it, and successful falsification will be obvious for him? Why on earth trust the client with the data in the first place? I have never liked the "encrypted cookie" way of handling session storage.

Just have a server side session store and all of this cookie encryption crap just vanishes. Of course that won't help you with session fixation etc, but the post doesn't address that stuff either. Do it over TLS and you're pretty safe though.

And let's not forget the author's suggestion to pad out the cookie with 1000 bytes to make it harder to falsify. That cookie gets send with every single request. 20 images on the page, you're sending 20KB of junk up just to load the page. On a connection with slow upstream, like say ADSL, you can easily add a second or two of request latency. You might not care but some people sure do.

And come on, I read until the very end expecting to hear what "processes or threads" have to do with security, so tell us already!
Cute. Is there a way to see my reminders or manage them? I was thinking of doing something like this but using a Jabber bot awhile ago but never got around to it. I think that would be a good interface for something like this.
My adaptation of esr's open source approach:

1. paint a picture of something really cool
2. deliver the smallest possible subset of that functionality, that runs
3. be guided by "bug reports" that request features to fill these *gaps*

This only works for a "flat" project - that is, where each additional feature can be added as a module. This requires a concept that is "flat" and an implementation architecture that is "flat" (has places to add each feature.) If the concept is not flat (or unknown), or if the right architecture is not flat (or unknown), this approach doesn't work.

This helps explain the kinds of projects that have popular open source implementations: copies (of concept and implementations) and system software.
That's why my belief is it's useful to see Atlas as a personal guide rather than a social one. Rand's treatises on doing what's right for yourself and never doing things that you don't respect, which actually appear better in The Fountainhead, are terrific guides for living honestly with yourself and with others, once you get over the intial I'm-a-dick-because-I-read-Ayn-Rand phase. Socially her argument falls apart, because she ignores a lot of evidence that proves her points wrong. (For instance, she denies global warming because she refuses to say that mankind should be limited by nature, which is a little insane.) But man-to-man, her work is a great guide about how to function in society without giving in.

That's what I was trying to say. Rand's books are very limited in scope, but if you treat them as such then they're not harmful books to read and enjoy. However, she does very specifically mention looters and inheritants as being the evil sort of rich, that which doesn't create but merely uses. So my initial point still stands: She admits that there's a problem there, even if she never really explains what she'd plan to do about it.
Please elaborate. If you want to have a discussion on this I'd love to, because I'm sure we can get into a lot of interesting topics from here. But you need to explain yourself a bit more, or else this is going nowhere.
That's what we are currently working on. Also we would support recurring reminders like "every month", "daily", etc.
Oracle CEO wants more Java on netbooks, devices
Process One releases their Erlang XMPP library
Very cool. I have always wanted to start a Haskell consultancy and run it out of that building ;)
Opera 10 beta is out
I played around with node last night a bit more. Here are one noob's observations:

For most things it feels pretty fast. A simple timer output showed less than 1, 1, 2 or 3 milliseconds for most operations including File I/O.

Importing files via node's 'import' and 'require' functions is, for lack of a better adjective, Erlang-ish. You must declare in the file you are importing which functions you would like to expose by making them members of a special object called 'exports'. For example if you have a factorial function in a file called factorial.js you must declare it as 'exports.factorial = function() { ... }'. This seems 1) strange, 2) not very Javascripty and 3) like it can severely limit the reuse of server-side js libs with other server-side and non-server-side js implementations. This was the biggest let down for me, since my dream is to be able to write libs that work on both the client and the server.

There was a weird bug I found when writing to a file. If I created a loop like so:

var times = [];
for (var i=0,j=1000; i<j; i++) {
var t1 = Date.now();
var file = new node.fs.File();
file.open('test.log', 'a+');
file.write(i + ' ' + new Date() + ' Hello World!\n');
file.close();
times.push(Date.now() - t1);
}

'file' would contain only 250 new lines of text, while the array times would show it's length to be 1000. I'm assuming this is some kind of bug, as the number of new lines added to the file seems fixed at 250. Setting the loop to 249 produced a times array with 249 items and a file with 249 new lines. Setting the loop to 251 produced a times array with 251 items and a file with 250 new lines. My C++ is very poor, but my guess is that each event has a queue which is hard coded at 250 and my loop over flowed the queue. This could also be a potentially huge issue with writing libraries around node.

It would be nice to see those two issues resolved or explained in better detail, particularly the import / export functionality.
Ask YC: The AppJet shutdown and the future of proprietary cloud platforms
I just finished reading the Sitepoint article at:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/03/appjet-discontinued/. The AppJet example seems to highlight the inherent risk of building your business on proprietary cloud platforms. Although AppJet offers some suggestions for porting your app to another server (http://appjet.com/hosting), it seems that building anything beyond experimental apps and services upon these platforms is extremely risky. Is the trade-off of easier maintenance and faster time-to-market worth it?

Perhaps the approach of selectively outsourcing components of your application to a cloud service provider with a real SLA is the better model (as people currently do with Amazon).
Videos from Golden Gate Ruby Conferece sessions are up (aka "GoGaRuCo")
Apple Bans RSS Reader Due To Bad Word In Feed Link
The problem with screen-shot is how do you test part of your page that is password protected? I tried the BrowserLab this morning and i can only test the public page.
They Might Be Profitable: AMD's six-core "Istanbul" reviewed
> Wasn't some work done on log-structured file systems done by DEC some time ago? I can't find a reference to it.

Didn't Ousterhout (who, amongst other things, worked on a log based file system) work there on sabbatical?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout
So is enterprise software. You make one mistake and you're stuck supporting it for the next 18 years.
lol - great list. I think there are few more to come:

Why Apple didn't launch Wave

How Google Wave Compares to Microsoft Groove|SharePoint

Google Wave for the iPhone

Google Wave API released!

Ask HN: Have you actually tried Google Wave yet?

It's quite possible that 1 or more of these already exist.
An excellent article from a magazine known for excellent journalism and mediocre fiction and poetry. I wasn't expecting a read this good.

I personally don't think creative writing is something that college teaching is suited for. A few courses, maybe, but a full major in creative writing is not only a risk, it is largely a waste of class time for the student. Since most of a creative writing major is just plain writing, followed by critique, the classroom rarely adds more than what students could get in a focused extracurricular group.
Long Titles used to be essential for reading xkcd, but I think the current Firefox build has it built-in.
Log structured fs (including gc, checkpointing, wear-leveling) has been quite prevalent in the embedded linux world for several years already e.g. jffs2 / yaffs / logfs / ubifs etc.

(Of course these typically target raw NAND flash via MTD / UBI layer, so typically aren't directly suited to the SSD block device abstraction)
For variety you should head up a block to the Argo in the Marquette building. I work above the Argo, but sometimes visit your Intelligentsia for variety :)
I always try to espouse the benefits of triple-rot13 as the cipher in interview questions about security. Key management is a breeze, for example, and it's VERY fast.

But it allows everyone to concentrate on how you're managing the secure context instead of what algorithm has been shown to cause cancer in rats.
Talking happens in real time and cannot be faked.

Besides there are multiple intelligences. No way you can determine intelligence from a single data point like how well you talk.
In case you're wondering, the paper and technology that this is based on is here: http://research.yahoo.com/node/2304
I think the most impmortnat problem is trying to hide the netowrk under an inhenrelty leaky abstraction: http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-May/03...
Avatars in Emails Increase Response Rate up to 20% for Rypple
But what if you can organize a carpenter company such that it can do twice as much construction work as before? Does that not give you two houses whereas before you had one? Why should you ascribe value to the first house, but not the second, when they are identical goods?

What you do here is assign zero value to productivity changes. If a change in productivity has zero value, then the value of the original productivity has zero value as well.

The only way to claim that a person who makes carpenters more efficient is worthless is to claim that carpenters are also worthless.
Bad news for IBM and Apple
yes there is going to be a a very succesful chinese twitter clone ,no doubt about it ... probably with a little more delay built in ...
I know. But he asked about favicon.ico.
Microsoft Wants Gadgets To Run Windows
Why wait, you can use parts of it today. Sure, IE may not get
it, but it is called progressive enhancement for a reason.
Clicktale + Rails = Better Usability
The Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.1 : a standard Haskell distribution for everyone
Well for one - cleaner code. Even using this "framework" the result is still much cleaner than super nested tables!
I'm so hot right now!
It was a very good thing for the US that we didn't have restrictions on imports. That's why trade negotiations are so backwards, if you look at them from a consumer perspective: "I'll hurt my people less, but only IF you also hurt your people less".

Access to better cars is good. The small, small minority of people in an individual industry hurt by more competition should react like any of us would in the things we build: try to build something better.
Bing TV ad
the catch is after 3 years you have to start paying for all the server software and tools you're now using with free glee.

it's sort of like a crack dealers sales approach - get them fixed on it then make them pay.

warren
I don't know what world writers like this live on but it's not the world I live on. When I suggest a product at work the first question I get is "how do we get support if something goes wrong?" The second question I get is "how much staff retraining will we have to do?" and the third is "how do we know this is going to make us more efficient?"

Wave is unsupported, hard to grasp (even many tech bloggers don't seem to grasp the concept), and has no proof of it's efficieny benefits. So I certainly wouldn't pitch it to management at this point.
Out of character, MS was handling this launch pretty well. I don't think this is going to help them at all. It looks like a parody video.
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