skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can we lay off on the obnoxious Rand criticism? She's like anybody: Half her ideas are really good and worth discussing, half of them are crap. Rand was a lot more obnoxious than a lot of philosophers, but that doesn't immediately invalidate her ideas, and the fact remains that shrill as her voice may sound in the philosophical world, she made her ideas easier to understand than most philosophers do.

Look at Nietzsche. Absolutely pretentious, wrote his philosophy in semifictional narratives, made up ridiculous fantasies like eternal recurrence. But people don't dis Nietzsche like they do Rand, not even when his readers are more obnoxious and pretentious than even the most obnoxious of Objectivists, because Nietzsche at least hit the vein of being difficult and therefore respectable.

Give Rand credit for at least one thing: Her ideas are given to you so simplistically that it's very easy to build a counterargument against them. Would that most philosophers would do the same favor.

That said, this article shouldn't be here, and Objectivism debates are old and tired.

tl;dr Blasting Rand without balance is just as bad as worshipping her without balance, so if you're going to disagree with her be less of a jerk about it.
Use internet explorer (never thought I'd say this).
You need to accept an add-in called "MS transfer manager".

The site generates keys but seems a bit buggy, also can't verify which of these products need a key.

At least it generates a key for Applications > Office XP > Office XP Professional - CD (English) : JPXQJ-...

Some keys show up others don't, I'll upgrade my IE to 8, let's see what happens.

Edit: After update to IE8 I get a descent error warning: "An Error Has Occurred: There was an error error while trying to retrieve requsted key information and we cannot process your request.

You can try to:

- your browser and retry the operation again in a few minutes.

- Contact Support

- Read the On-Line Self Help

Reference Id: 19497582

This error has been logged with the reference number noted above. Please use this reference number if you contact support."
I strongly take issue with this approach. Politics are one thing, but as a site somewhat devoted to startups, an article on the economy, vapid or precise, certainly has a place. If people didn't want to read it, they would not vote for it.
I think the fact that Google allowed a very small core team to design and develop the application has more to do with innovation than their lack of enterprise software influencing the final product.

Innovation seems to stem more from the vision of a individual (or brothers, in this case) than from the "design by committee" approach which seems to be adopted at enterprise software companies.
The real meaning of the iPhone
This is a matter of taste - benefits of the server-driven architecture are: no limits from the server, no GWT recompilation, direct access to server-side API and resources, better security, full Java virtual machine, full tooling and debugging support. Downsides are: more client-server traffic, more data to store in HttpSession.
Should creative writing be taught?
Not mentioned: Amity Shlaes (the author of the article) also wrote a book about the Great Depression, called "The Forgotten Man". It is no surprise she would write about Atlas Shrugged.

From the blurb about the book on her site:

"Franklin Roosevelt systematically established the modern political constituency, from unions to artists, to senior citizens. Roosevelt's solution was to spend for these groups, so extensively that federal spending that year outpaced state and local spending, for the first time ever in peacetime. The consequence was the Roosevelt landslide of 1936 --but also the modern entitlement trap. Roosevelt often spoke of the Forgotten Man, the man "at the bottom of the economic pyramid." Yet, Miss Shlaes shows, his New Deal created a new forgotten man, the man who subsidizes the funding of other constituencies -- and who haunts politics in all developed nations today."
Why is a static site about cross-browser compatibility written in Flash/Flex/whatever voodoo Adobe's pushing now?
Because of the server-driven architecture, you can use graphing libraries like JFreeChart easily.
Good read. +1 for Louis CK reference.

A question to start up founders: How do you guys handle security? Do you hire consultants/pen-testers? Do you just copy+paste code from the internet? Do you use whatever framework's components for it?
One of the interesting things you can discover by using Google Analytics: if you publish a privacy policy and put links to it in the standard places, nobody will read it.

Of my last 100,000 visitors, 19 of them read the privacy policy. That number is low enough that it could be caused totally by misclicks.

Real people do not care about privacy in this sense.
ICanHasCheezburger's Porad: A 'lazy, messy, backwards' way of creating a startup
I wish I had known about this during my OOP course. This looks slightly more intuitive than the quick sequence diagram editor (sdedit) http://sdedit.sourceforge.net/ . The thing about sdedit, however, is you can see your diagram as you code it, which I always thought was pretty sweet
And it's so much better when it finally starts involving other people besides yourself.
More titles coming up in the next few days, just so we get them out of the way:

How Google Wave will Make You a Better Lover

Google Latest Wave of Invasion of Privacy

Google Wave Upgraded to Tsunami

Google Wave Downgraded to Ripple

Why Google Wave Sucks

Why Google Wave Rocks!

Google Wave Should Be Written in C to Make it Faster

Anything else I missed?
The "badness" of enterprise software is something that I've recently been brainstorming a lot about.

I think there are two fundamental reasons for the "badness" of enterprise software.

1) Too many cooks spoil the broth. Most enterprise software packages cater to be everything to everyone. Most absolutely great products are the vision of a small team (see: most of apple products, OS X, iPod, etc. in other marketplaces: the dyson vacuum, amazon, zappos, etc.)

Unfortunately, some of the worst products are also the result of a small team. (apple hi-fi, apple tv, newton) It's funny how when these products fail, pundits blame it on their inability to listen to the marketplace; however, when they succeed, pundits say that "they stuck with their convictions to make a winning product".

It's simply safer for big companies to develop a product that's "everything for everybody". Windows, SAP, etc., can push these products through b/c they have an awesome salesforce. It's amazing to me how easy it is for big companies to sell inferior products, simply because of their existing mindshare. If it's one thing big companies know how to do, it's leverage this.

Additionally, developer hours are expensive. It's easier to make a profit by "customizing" a product to a user (which you can bill for), rather than create a whole new product (this product doesn't exist yet, but we can make it and maybe they'll buy it vs. "oh yeah, our product can already do that, we just need to tweak it to your needs")

As a startup, it's easy to fail developing "everything for everybody". Actually, since you're small and the big players are really big, the odds are stacked against you- you're almost guaranteed to fail.

I feel like the only way to succeed is if you aim high- push for the real innovation. Throw out everything, and re-think everything from the ground up. These ideas will probably also fail- for every iPod, there's an Apple TV. For every google search, there's a google youtube (which is very neat, but doesn't make any money).

Still, I feel like this model is the best opportunity at creating something revolutionary, instead of being just another ho-hum also ran.

The only two startup companies that I've seen attack the enterprise market really well are 37 Signals and Fog Creek. For most of their products, they threw out everything and started from scratch- they created their vision. They've both been wildy successful, but even with this approach, they have some mediocre products (CityDesk, for example).
Uhg, I hate BrowserShots ... using http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ and loving it so far. Doesn't have all the 'options' but live testing in the browser is the way to go.
Well, part of it is that cigarettes are ubiquitous in many places, and considerably more socially acceptable than crack. I don't smoke, but I know people who have had to completely avoid bars and coffeehouses for months at a time because they associated them with smoking.
Didn't you read the article?

...they mentioned that FOX flagged their use of the word "groin" as being
potentially offensive. Imagining, in this post-Family Guy/South Park world,
that the word "groin" was problematic so recently really makes me marvel
at how quickly social mores can change.)
What are you talking about?

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bitworking.org
There's been a little war in Iraq. A war which practically nobody wants. Why the hell would anyone start another?

Plus Kim Jong-il (and the military leaders) would have to be clinically insane to even dare launch a nuclear weapon at another country. US/UK/France/China/Russia have enough nukes to flatten the rest of the world...it'd be suicide!
I enjoy the fantasy where all of the rich have earned their money through productive means and not through inheritance or national gambling.

Or the basic premise of equating money with wealth. In that having lots of one immediately means you have lots of the other.
True, but "Who's on First" is still one of the funniest things you can find. Not all humor needs to be fresh.
I was trying to say that asymmetry in communication is not a new phenomena and might already be descending.
Yeah, in the past six years I've come to accept that it's the worst possible solution, except for all the others. At this point I would be happy if we could isolate all the new "well-known locations" to a specific sub-path, such as /.well-known/

http://bitworking.org/news/431/wave-first-thoughts
How about this, then: The article defies logic. There are a couple reasonable connections given between Rand and the modern world (e.g. the note about the doctors), but the rest of the connections are so tenuous or ill-framed, she might as well be explaining the economic genius of The House at Pooh Corner. Merely listing a character name followed by a real-life name doesn't cut it.

By 2000, that 1 percent was paying 37 percent, and "Atlas Shrugged" sales were at 120,000. By 2006, the top 1 percent carried 40 percent of the burden.

Obviously, increased sales of "Atlas Shrugged" leads to legislation increasing taxes on the rich, because Randian lobbyists are at home, reading. Or -- just guessing, here -- this correlation is meaningless and should be omitted?

This one takes the cake:

Of all American governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger of California is the one who most resembles Rand’s outsized characters. [...] Yet Schwarzenegger seems to be missing the Rand gene. His policies are all pain and no growth.

Either he resembles something in the book or he doesn't. Why claim both?
Rand actually does take that into account. She looks down on people who inherit their wealth and on people who earn money through scams rather than through producing a good service.

She never once talks about how to address these people. Perhaps she was hoping it would be possible to enlighten people enough to make them look past such scammers and dilettantes, but if she was then I'd have to disagree severely with her position.
Just talking about the economy also has almost no place on HN. As a bassic rule of thumb if you see the same thing on CNN or FOX then it has no place here. The goal is to avoid becoming Redit / Dig / Slashdot and the fastist way to let that happen is to constantly talk about Politics or the Economy. They might be News, but they don't really have a significant impact on startups. Most small company's don't care about the larger economy at all. It's just not important when all you need to do is find 100,000+ of revenue each month to thrive.

Exeptions would be a law that is going into effect that chaning the rules for becoming startups or some such.

PS: Ok, talking about what exit number you need to retire based on X income tax would be a good and usefull article, linkbait that's talking about politics belongs somewhere else.
How can we call this Free Trade when one side has open access to markets and the other side can doesn't.

Anybody ever manage a popular Web site that goes black for days? People forget about the web site, the momentum is gone, and you lose a lot of business.

There is nothing fair about our trade policies. This is a big part of what America does - create information systems, and it's not fair that China can block it with no good reason.
Try the NAPKIN style diagrams. I came across them in a technical article and found them eye-catching and fantastic. This is a neat and useful piece of software. The text format let's you crank out a meaningful diagram very quickly.
An Erlang 'app' that interfaces with a CouchDB to create a real-time web API?! I think this blog just won buzzword bingo!
So, is there much to be gained from encryption anyway? If, as the candidate, I suggested sending a cookie as 'userId=39493&role=user&timestamp=1414919&hash=<sha256-of-key-with-data>' then would I lose brownie points?

I assume my hash comparison function is constant time (eg. XOR(a[x],b[x])==0), rather than comparing of char-by-char.
Programmer WebComic Strips
I can't imagine how long it's going to take to get HTML 5 supported in a decent percentage of installed browsers?
The link submitted is for UK. Not sure if it makes a difference, but there are different links for US https://om2.one.microsoft.com/offer/technet_na.aspx and Canada https://om2.one.microsoft.com/offer/technet_can.aspx
3 kids. I agree, having children increased my focus and discipline immensely.

However, as time goes by I'm realizing that it's going to be extremely difficult (nearly impossible) to spend the time I need to spend between my normal job and family requirements to getting my web app and associated business up and running. I'm keeping at it, though.
You blogged the shit outta that post!

Definitely an interesting read even for crypto dilettantes. Perhaps, especially for crypto dilettantes.

I took Rivest's Computer and Network Security class in college and the most important takeaway for me, far outstripping all of the interesting technical content, was "Don't implement crypto."
Balsamiq Mockups: Pencil and Paper 2.0
It's probably worth pointing out: you have the same problems if you're using CFB, OFB, or CTR mode (these are the "stream cipher" modes for DES/AES/whatever that encrypt one byte at a time). There's apocrypha about these modes not being vulnerable to the attack. Bad apocrypha:

Set up an encryptor:

irb> e = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new('aes-256-ofb')
=> #<OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher:0x647100>
irb> e.key = "\x11" * 32
irb> e.iv = "\x00" * 16

A decryptor:

irb> d = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new('aes-256-ofb')
=> #<OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher:0x647120>
irb> d.decrypt
irb> d.key = "\x11" * 32
irb> d.iv = "\x00" * 16

Encrypt something:

irb> ciphertext = (e << "A * 40")
=> "a\255N\211XEn\001\347$\275)\311%Ht\2356\254m\b\234z\375\311\006\335\305F\231~\201\243\236\3628w\267\3454"

Make an XOR mask:

irb> mask = ("187 she wrote".to_bignum ^ ("A" * 13).to_bignum).to_rawstring
=> "pyva2)$a63.5$"

XOR it into the ciphertext:

irb> new_ciphertext = (ciphertext.to_bignum ^ mask.to_bignum).to_rawstring

NOW decrypt it:

irb> d << nct
=> "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA187 she wrote"
I've been using the Opera 10 alpha as my primary browser, and I love it. The addition of in line spell check allowed me to leave Firefox behind 6 months ago.

I pretty much only use it for the Firebug plugin, but the Opera's clone of Firebug, Dragonfly is looking better all the time. To check it out click Tools>Advanced>Developer tools.
No. Like I said, the candidate aced the interview. Holy, he knew what CBC was! Amazing!

Often you don't need confidentiality, and in those cases, HMAC can be a safer bet than a secure encrypted message format. You want to use HMAC though, not a simple hash with a secret key in it.
Who said international competition was fair? Presumably, the Chinese government pursues policies which it feels are to its advantage and which it has the leverage to get away with.

Also, I suspect this is more due to the government's inability to control the content on these sites than to the desire to promote local firms over foreign ones (although that's probably a bonus, from their perspective).
Steve Blank: Vertical Markets 3: Reducing Risk in Startups
Any idea if her book is as flawed as the article? For instance, arguing that the top 1% of earners covered 26% of the tax burden in 1986 and 40% in 2006, without mentioning that since the top 1% took 11.3% of the income in 1986 and 22.06% in 2006, the tax rate on the top 10% of income actually decreased substantially? I try to avoid polemics that use statistics so disingenuously.

* http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
As noodle said, the link is broken and 404s on click. Specifically, it seems to be doubled (copy and paste mistake?). The proper link is half of what's there now, i.e. http://www.techflash.com/I_Can_Has_Cheezburger_at_Startpad_4.... It works just fine.
Man, you had "don't implement crypto" and I was all, that kicks ass. Then you edited it to say "in general", and now I'm sad.
"The SD/MSC Generator is an easy alternative to using mouse-centric tools..."

Hmmm..use the keyboard instead of the mouse? At one time, you would have been laughed out of the room. Nice to see that some apps understand what geeks have known all along: sometimes the command line just makes more sense.
Most surprising quote of the article (IMO):
"Zynga, the largest applications developer on Facebook, with 42m users of its games, is reported to be nearing annual sales of $100m. Together, developers working on Facebook’s platform are expected to make more than $500m this year – perhaps more than Facebook itself."
Is there any downside though to using something like the @font-face css3 tag?

It seems to fallback quite nicely to whatever secondary, standard font you setup so I don't see why not use it to give the people using more up-to-date browsers a benefit.
I didn't buy the GPG/TLS thing before. After reading this I do. I just realized how completely out of my depth I am for crypto stuff. At least now I know ...
I enjoyed it, even if it makes my head spin. I'm several years from my last reading of 'Applied Cryptography' and have never really gone into the deep end of that pool. So what, it [edit: meaning the blog article] is a fun read of hacking away in the security code world.

[edit: Thomas, thanks for the book recommendation below, I'll definitely grab a copy]
ASP.NET MVC development for Linux
Microsoft benefits immensely from having programmers building things that run on Microsoft technology. It's the consequences of the tool use that are important, not the tool use itself. Adobe, conversely, doesn't gain anything from having images in the wild that were drawn by Adobe tools. Adobe is a tool company, so they charge for tools.

There's a good Joel Spolsky quote saying that the only reason Microsoft doesn't give its development tools away for free is to avoid accidentally cutting off the air to the 3rd party vendors who build and sell add-ons. There needs to be a little money changing hands in that space so that companies are used to spending money on tools, and therefore are willing to pay for things like ReSharper, Ants Profiler and CodeSmith.
Google is pushing big for HTML5 and it seems to be in the works for Firefox 3.5, Safari, not sure about IE.
Median # of tweets = 1
Ha! Good point. Edit undone. :)
It's funny the first few times you hear it.
Actually I thought I explained it well enough.

He's saying that Pixar films outpace Dreamworks films from an artistic point of view, because they both use the animation artform to tell their story.

I'm saying that both studios have different primary goals, one is squarely focussed on maximising profits while the other is more focussed on 3D animation as an artform (which is apparent given its catmull/lasseter pedigree).

That would be like trying to compare the artistic values of a Tarantino film to a Michael Bay film, which nobody in their right mind would - yet because the two studios use animation as an artform (instead of filming actors in the tarantino vs bay scenario which would be a classic apples vs oranges argument), people automatically lump them together... which is fundamentally wrong.

Now if you want to discuss two animation studios which have similar goals - Pixar vs Blue Sky Studios is definitely good for comparison, Pixar vs Dreamworks, however, is not.
People asked the same question about Japan in the 70s and 80s. Japanese products like cars were over here, but it was almost impossible to sell a North American product in Japan.

But people voted for politicians who give them access to the goods they want to buy without worrying about nuänces on international trade disputes.

If we shut Wal-Mart down and blocked Honda from selling cars here, there would be an outcry.
That queue takes well over 2 hours to finish simple IE screenshots. I ditched BrowserShot some time ago thanks to its popularity.
You really start to feel just how huge and bloated a lot of web pages have become when you get a mobile broadband dongle and are charged £15 per GB by Vodafone. One popular British forum site has some pages weighing in at upwards of 1MB each!

Opera 10 attempts to remedy this with its "Turbo" function - if you've used Opera Mini on a mobile phone, it's basically this for the desktop browser, going through a proxy to shrink images and strip out unnecessary stuff. It's worth having Opera installed on your laptop just for this - on average, it's been shrinking pages by around 3x for me. A brilliant and unique feature.
It's more of a Lotus Notes (with Sametime) on lithium than FriendFeed on crack -- it solves many (but not all) of the same problems (without, of course, the need to be backwards-compatible to the 1993 version). And like Notes, there is going to be a sharp divide between those who "get it" and those who don't.

Like Notes/Domino/Sametime, it is replete with features that allow real-time interaction between users and time management. But (also like Notes) it's biggest feature is that allows "meetings" to become unstuck in time while generating tasks, workflow and approvals in a way that simple email or a wiki cannot. I would expect that shops/orgs that "get it" will find that it quickly becomes an indispensable tool, and those that don't but adopt it anyway will find it a horribly clunky way of going about things in the same way they would have done without it.
Throw that book away, and buy Ferguson and Schneier's "Practical Cryptography", which Schneier contributed to in penance for writing "Applied Cryptography". Portions of the proceeds of "Practical Cryptography" are donated to a fund that helps the people who wrote crypto based on "Applied Cryptography".
It seems kind of silly to write one's own code for anything, if you have access to a well-tested library that does what you want. The only reason to do otherwise is where there is no such library. Crypto is just an example of an area that's particularly hard to get right: the solution is no different than for other things.
Apply antiperspirant at night
I have not read "The Forgotten Man", may read it in the future.

Actually I thought the article was trying for an easy to understand "hook" with the tax info, since it is unlikely that the top 1% of earners are the bulk of those buying the $7.99 (or whatever it is) paperback edition at the local Barnes and Noble.