skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The bootmakers likely need nails specifically designed for their boots so buying generic ones from China isn't an option. Instead they need to source a local supplier and tell them how the nails for their boots models need to be made"

That's beautifully conceived, but you conveniently ruled out an option that sly bootmakers could get their hands on a Chinese dictionary and instruct these cheap Chinese suppliers (rather than the supplier next door) on what type of nails exactly they would like to have made for them ;)
Show HN: Custom "upgrade your browser" page with recommendations & more
Samsung is one shady company. They get away with murder in South Korea, given that they make up a huge chunk of SK's GDP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kun-hee#Samsung_scandal

They do make decent electronics, but I wouldn't trust anything they say.
The Galaxy Nexus was slightly curved but i always thought it was to prevent scratches when putting it on the table with the display down.
OTOH, there's something about the need for an economy to be highly taxable which is anti-progress.

1950-2000 Copyright laws were a natural fit for the technologies of the day. It made sense to sell music on discs or tapes. It was easy and possible to create and enforce laws which regulated this. This happened to result in an enormous industry where big profits were made. Then technology changed in a way that made copyright laws a bad fit. The power accumulated in that industry allows them to fight to try and force the world to behave as it had previously, to keep their business model alive.

Over the last decades technology and the general structure of advanced economies (especially in Europe) have allowed a relatively (relative to other times & places) high levels of taxation government services. Governments learned how tax while avoiding destructive reactions in the economy. In a lot of cases this was trial and error (eg, >60% marginal tax rates for high earners). Subsequently a lot of European countries are now at a point where public spending is ~43% of the total.

If technology starts to threaten these models, I think we'll find it very hard to adjust. Governments will have the choice between adapting (unlikely), raising taxes in less disciplined and potentially more disruptive ways, or trying to keep the world as it was by preventing the new technology from being adopted.

I don't think bitcoin is the only such threat. Income inequality might be such a pressure. Mobile freelancers are another. Anyway, if bitcoin gets to the point where it genuinely threatens a government's ability to collect taxes, we're in for trouble.
This is a very common problem in a lot of signed cookie based session stores. Some frameworks get it right, some don't.

The best remediation is to include an expire timestamp within the content of the signed cookie and to check this on the server - you can't rely on the client deleting the cookie (never trust the client).

The guys at GitHub fixed this particular issue in their rails stack, and submitted a pull request 4 months ago:

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/11168

It started out well, and their proposed solution would have fixed this problem. The thread got bogged down in discussing backwards compatibility and the original submitter just gave up on it.

I hope this might trigger somebody to pick that pull request up again and get it sorted and merged.

Since signed cookies are now a popular form of persisting session state I have been meaning to run through all the popular web app frameworks to check this issue.

edit: check out TimedSerializer from the itsdangerous Python library that Flask uses:

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/itsdangerous/blob/master/itsdan...
Sure, it's the default, but don't people realize never to trust clientside data? I don't know if CookieStore is signed or not, but I generally assume even if I sign the data it's not safe.

It's not that hard to just set up a Redis or whatever store to handle stuff like this, I never understood why people whouldn't bother.
The point of 86400 is to give a fixed way to calculate the date from gettimeofday(2), allowing people to write code that refers to future dates in the same way as past dates. Using variable-length days makes future dates indeterminate, which would cause no end of mischief for interest rate and billing rate calculations. (Think fraud—allocate the budget for one second before a potential leap second, pay the expenses after the leap second has been added to the table.)
I'm surprised that this issue is being raised now. It seems like it should have been obvious.

It looks like a fundamental design problem with a client side token... You can limit intrusions by adding an expires_at value to the cookie data. But I don't see any way to actually expire a token without some server side tracking.
maybe hes just doing what hes good at, thats what most people end up doing.
Winning the Race With Ever-Smarter Machines
I hate to be a cynic, but I disagree with many of the points put forth in this article, points that are critical to supporting its thesis. I list some disagreements below.

>Then you have what we’re seeing in America, which is the long, slow erosion of wealth and savings through a steady stream of monetary inflation.

Inflation does not reduce wealth. Inflation reduces the value of money. All real goods and services are worth what they're worth, regardless of the stick used to measure them. Inflation only changes the nominal measure of wealth, not wealth itself!

Furthermore, economists generally regard a small amount of inflation as better than a small amount of deflation. First, inflation helps keep prices and salaries less sticky, by constantly devaluing them. Second, inflation helps keep the banking system working (I believe). If nominal interest rates ever go negative, people will withdraw deposits from banks and just hold cash (which always has a nominal interest rate of 0%).

>Not only does inflation slowly eat away at individual wealth, but it also disincentivizes savings.

How does inflation disincentivize savings? Assuming that nominal interest rates are constant, then yes, inflation leads to lower savings. But when inflation is high, nominal rates are high, and when inflation is low, nominal rates are low. The relationship is not clear. Also, remember that S=I, savings=investment. A common misconception is that savings is putting cash aside for the future, whereas investment is spending cash on the future. However, they are actually the same thing. Read more about why savings=investment here: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=12617

>One Bitcoin user created an exchange which completely solved the problem of violence in the drug trade.

This user also allegedly hired a hitman to murder someone.

>Governments try to control currencies. With all that power, shouldn’t they seek to learn as much about them as possible? Why would anyone attempt to kneecap thousands of unpaid, volunteer experimenters, who are constantly sharing with the world what we’re learning about how money works? It’s very odd.

I think the US Government is concerned with people breaking its laws. In this case, illegally buying drugs and illegally not paying taxes. It sounds like a reasonable concern to me, though I admit I'm not well informed and I welcome additional comments.

---

One big downside of a "free" currency is that there are no restorative forces to keep its value constant. A huge advantage of having the US government behind the dollar is that the US can control the value of the dollar. Most of the value here comes, paradoxically, not from controlling the dollar but in markets believing that the US can control the dollar. Those market expectations then themselves keep the value of the dollar mostly constant. Having a currency with a predictable and constant value is hugely important for trade. For this reason, I can't imagine Bitcoin ever succeeding on a large scale for a long time.
To be fair, even the most gentrified areas in Berlin are still affordable compared to Hamburg, Munich or Vienna.
German unions also own stock and sit on the board of their employers, which is the real difference. American unions are much more parasitic as they have zero vested interest in the hosts they infest.
> I can make an infinity-inch screen that takes up no space.

I don't understand what you meant by that. It's going to take infinite space...
Just as an example, Django uses a default SESSION_COOKIE_AGE of 2 weeks [1]

[1] - https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#std:sett...
Pretty sure this can be fixed with a timestamp in the session data. You can either expire the timestamp by time or by keeping a datetime field on the user and updating the timestamp after a password change. Or you can use a combination of these two.

This is not a new issue. It is a well known limitation of the cookie store. I've been working around this with timestamps for years.
Hires and fires the executives. Doing that wrong is catastrophic.
Cookie-based sessions have many, very reasonable, use cases.

You are also clearly neglecting the fact that proper session cookies are _always_ cryptographically signed and cannot be tampered with, if properly implemented.
A lot of people move out of London when they have children. Inner city schoolkids are scary, many don't want their children growing up being mixed up with gangs. I know I didn't.
Cookie store has always been signed and in rails 4 it's encrypted.
You don't seem to notice that many of the categories you mentioned are irrelevant. Maybe being microsoftie clouds your view?

Windows may be best _desktop_ operating system for enterprise, not _best_ operating system. Subtle difference. OSX and Linux are not bringing desktop OS to tablets and touch laptops, because nobody wants desktop OS there, everybody wants tablet optimized OS. C# may be syntactically best language for enterprise, but it's ecosystem is lacking compared to other languages (for too long, it was use-MS-only-frameworks-and-products-land, so nobody bothers now). It is disputable whether Xbox won the game console war, but even if it did, this is a niche market. Kinect may be very unique, but we are talking niche in the niche. Surface Pro may be the best desktop replacement tablet, but nobody wants to replace desktop with tablets, just like nobody wants to replace truck with sport car.
not looking forward to having this discussion with my wife come baby time. i don't like to share anything online and she loves to have pictures up all the time.

it sucks that so many net-based businesses make privacy so hard.
Elaine Wherry: Why I Now Believe the Glass Ceiling Is Real
Misleading:

>Separately, it is a good design for your Web app to require that the user supply their current password before changing sensitive fields such as password or email address. If the CookieStore-stored session were to be hijacked, the malicious user could change the user’s password:

I don't see why that's the case - presumably, if I'm requiring the user's password to perform sensitive account changes, then the hijacking user will not be able to perform those changes. It's not like the CookieStore contains a plaintext password or anything.

This is ultimately a simple replay attack, which any application using a server-side session would be equally vulnerable to. The effects of that replay attack are definitely worse with CookieStore, because a user cannot subsequently invalidate their session from the server side (although the app owner can obviously invalidate every session).

This could be solved relatively easily by providing a per-session token which can be invalidated, but at that point I guess you'd have to question why you're using a cookie-stored session anyway.
> Have you ever heard anyone say "I don't like books and reading in general"?

Well, I have heard engineery types saying they don't see the point of reading fiction ("it's just made up stories"), and more frequently have heard them disparaging subjects like philosophy and history. Maybe that's the equivalent response?
Well, nothing stops anyone from starting a company organized that way. It's called a cooperative.
You mean I should have submitted it 80 years ago?
Might I suggest: "When Money Dies" ?
The classic history of what happens when a nation’s currency depreciates beyond recovery.
http://www.amazon.com/When-Money-Dies-Devaluation-Hyperinfla...
Since you mention studying the history of money, Niall Ferguson's Ascent of Money documentary is excellent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xx_5PuLIzc
How would you do it with redis exactly?
Welcome to Flipcase
I think you're probably right. But if you asked me to guess a year ago, I would have said that the engineering challenge of making a flexible touch screen display would be a lot greater than that of making a flexible circuit board (assuming that the components themselves are small enough to not need to be flexible).
These numbers really make my mind boggle. Not only is it that the salaries are high for the tech industry (not saying too high, simply high), but from my recent interviewing experience, it seems that Silicon Valley bumps up the price for most engineers, data scientists etc. compared to other start-up cities/areas. Does someone know if this simply down to the concentration of start-ups and access to funding in the Bay Area or is there something else that causes the salaries to be so markedly higher than else where?
Many people model technology adoption as an S curve (with its differential, the adoption rate, resembling a normal distribution): https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=technology+curve&tbm=isch They believe Microsoft's main revenue-generating technologies (Microsoft and Office) are at the 'mature' or 'stagnation' part of the curve.

This is in line with this ten-year stock price graph: http://goo.gl/yyUwgr
I think it's possible do to so, I remember seeing this ARM USB/HDMI board, which apparently can mirror the screen over USB: http://www.fxitech.com/technology/any-screen-ip/

Not sure how well it works, though.
Understanding Advanced Mathematics
Yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6542797
Semiofftopic: Animated favicons are evil. Can't just leave the tab open to take a look at a later time.
I used a tethered unlimited data iphone 4 as my only internet for 18 months after I got my first job (and thus treated myself to a smartphone). Three (UK Carrier) never complained - even when I was downloading seasons of shows or 20gb games from steam. My usage was hundreds of GB.

As far as I am concerned that is worthy of loyalty, and I intend to remain with them unless they change their behaviour - even if not the absolute cheapest.

Bizarre that them doing what they said they would should surprise me and engender loyalty ofc, but it did. Just my 2 cents.
Become a Paperless Remote Worker in 5 Apps
It seems as though this tangent has quickly turned into a discussion about consumerism (and indirectly its relation to capitalism).
Well, U.S. email is safer in the U.S.

Fixed that for you. I don't like the way the article implicitly assumes an American audience, and so do the comments here. As a European, my email is certainly not safer in the US than in Europe.
Facebook buys Israeli startup Onavo for more than $100 million
Don't underestimate the 'halo' effect (not Halo, though it may also apply) that games have on a platform. Much of MS Windows' early success and dominance was a result of having many more games available than Mac OS.
This is the strangest title I've seen in a while. Was there an "Urban whore" train that wrecked the weekend? Did the "urban whore" train-wreck the weekend? (is train-wreck even a verb?)
Original press release from the University of Sussex: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/newsandevents/?id=21417

Original journal article: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/physics/iqt/PhysRevLett111140501.pdf

Article at Physical Review Letters (where it's being published): http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v111/i14/e140501

Website of research group responsible: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/physics/iqt/
Is this valid even if you use session instead of cookie?
I don't get why you would have to stop if someone is really really talented. Not everyone value this as much as the other guy.
Computer Science in Italy is just wrong
In USA everything can be a verb. It's a very active country.
> In an earlier incarnation I saw Microsoft play legal hardball against anyone who tried to sell PCs with both Windows and another OS installed at the factory…)

I know they played commercial hardball with people wanting to offer options other than MS operating systems. Does anyone have any information about them playing legal hardball (lawsuits or threats)?
I'm familiar with Richard Feynman, have read this before and voted it up anyway. Why? Because it's a really fantastic read and being reminded of the content every year or two is definitely a good thing.
Canadian gov't to push cable providers to unbundle channels
Couldn't agree more. I see nothing but a black page.
Here's another lesser known theoretician who predicted it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abramowski
I'm not sure if his works are available online, esp. in English. Quotation on some message board: http://goo.gl/91lAu7
I work on a system split into 4-6 applications, depending on what you consider to be part of the system. We have a tier of integration tests that run across several of them. I can confirm that it is indeed often dreadful.

At the moment, we don't use VMs, we just fire up multiple servers on the same box. They use different ports, so it's no big deal. The tests are framed as being for one particular application in the system (eg a test that asserts that the front-end server displays the right profit and loss is a test for the front-end server, even though it uses the price server and the calculation server). Tests for a given application will use the current checkout of that application's code, and obtain packaged versions of the other applications from our internal artifact store. Tests always uses the latest versions of those available; the assumption is that the latest version will have been deployed by the time the code under test is deployed.

There are plenty of things that the multiple-apps-on-one-box approach doesn't test, mostly around networking, so we are trying to get our VM tooling up to speed to run multiple VMs instead. We already use the tooling to deploy VMs for apps in production, but it needs some tweaking to work well on desktops and in CI. It's not clear that this approach will completely replace the multiple-apps-on-one-box approach, because of the overhead in starting the VMs. We'll play it by ear.

Some of the dreadfulness of this approach comes from mismatches between test and production around versioning and networking. Most of it comes from the fact that in practice, it is much harder to track down the source of an error than when testing a single monolithic application.

Now, it could be the case that this pain, and the other pain resulting from splitting a system into multiple small applications, is worth it, because that splitting brings other advantages. I don't have a parallel version of our system implemented as a monolith, so i can't tell you if that's true. I have serious doubts about it, though.
[youtube] Google and NASA's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab
There is such thing as having 'enough' in life. For many people, having a mediocre job is OK if you can simply take care of your family, and have a happy home life.

I for one, will never judge anyone who chooses happiness and life balance over career success.
The problem with this is, that the demands, that can destroy a company, still can be real demands.

The company says, it has to pay you $5 per hour or they couldn't employ you and it isn't even lying.

You say, you can't work for a wage below $10 per hour and your reasons for this are valid, too.

If the company wins, the workers can't live from their wage.
If the workers win, the company can't employ enough of them to conduct business.
I'm near East Croydon - you can get 2 bed houses in the ~200k range, and 3 bed houses with a garden in the 250k-300k range, and with rents to match. 15 min to Victoria 18-20 min to London Bridge, which frankly means that despite being zone 5 it's still faster to get to the centre than in a lot of places in zone 2/3.

Less desirable areas of Croydon are cheaper (on the opposite end of the spectrum, you can buy 6-8 bedroom mansions in the 800k-1.5m range, still a steal compared to central London)

The price pressure is so high in central London because so many people can afford it, and prefer to pay out ludicrous amounts rather than even consider moving further out - it's the opposite of the trend cited in the article: The prices are skyrocketing not because outsiders use it as investments, but because the demand make the properties a good investment. The outsiders buying explains the high purchase prices in the centre, the demand explains the pressure on rental prices.
How can you, adult, be embarrassed by something you did as a toddler or even 5 year old?
Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in.

Yeah, tell me about it. I fell into the trap a couple of months ago. I was tasked with porting my company's browser's 2D graphics backend onto Android OpenGL. My first attempt allowed the browser to draw into graphics buffers that I would load into a texture using glTexImage2D.

A few co-workers felt that this was less efficient than the old 2D APIs, where we would draw into a buffer that would be directly read by the blitter hardware, without having to do a load step. I agreed - on the face of it, if we could arrange things to draw into the texture buffer directly we could save memory and processor cycles, so I started hunting on the Internet to see if anyone else had come to the same conclusion.

It turns out that the guys that were developing Firefox for Android had had exactly the same problem, and they hacked together a solution where they used some internal Android APIs for graphic buffers, that they accessed through dlopen/dlsym. They then linked the buffer to an eglImage, and created a texture from the eglImage. I figured that hey, if the Firefox guys are doing it, then it's probably not to bad an idea.

Unfortunately I should have taken the next step in my investigations, and ask myself exactly what that code that created an eglImage and linked it to a texture was actually doing. If I had investigated that more closely, I would have realised that behind the scenes there's an implicit equivalent of glTexImage2D being done - the problem being that the internal format of a texture is not a simple bitmap. The image is tiled so that OpenGL can draw a texture to the screen with any rotation and have roughly the same performance - if you use a standard bitmap layout, memory paging makes drawing tall thin rectangles much slower than drawing wide short rectangles. So, for OpenGL (or at least OpenGL ES) to be able to draw the texture to the screen, it first reads the data in from the eglImage, tiling it as it goes. This is exactly the same workload that you have in glTexImage2D, and it requires you to keep two copies of the buffer - the one you draw into, and the one that has been tiled for OpenGL.

Anyway, it took me about a month to get the eglImage solution to work (apart from everything else, you are exposed to odd behaviour by the graphics libraries of each Android tablet that your code runs on, that you have to write special code to handle, ie it's not very portable as a solution). Once I realised that I wasn't actually gaining anything from the exercise, I had to go and rip out all of that native graphic buffer code, and put back in the original standard texture code. I probably wasted 6 weeks stuffing around with all of this.

Lesson learned - if you are worrying about optimising code, you need to understand what is being done by the compiler / hardware, and it is pointless changing code until you have that understanding. Don't just accept stuff that you read on the Internet, where possible you need to go and look at source code, or official documentation. Anything else is running the risk of cargo-culting.