skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "History will look back at China’s one-child policy with bewilderment, even disbelief."

History will look back on China and wonder why only China had any bloody sense.

> And they see it as a sign that the government in Beijing is finally catching up with the times.

This whole article exults political perception above reality. Politics is a sickness.
North Texas Drivers Stopped at Roadblock Asked for Saliva, Blood
It's quite possible the dev knew it was a bad idea and maybe even argued against it but was told to implement it this way anyway.

The problem a dating site probably has is people who sign up accounts and then stop using them. They want to send these users reminder emails in the hope that some of them re-engage.

Problem is that some of these users have probably forgotten which password they use for that website, and some % of those will not bother using the password reset mechanism.

So someone in marketing has the bright idea of sending emails that include the username/password combo, the dev explains why this is a terrible idea and then gets overruled.
thx, will fix it. any other typo ?
MS Outlook has taken this approach, IIRC - you can send a "message cancellation", which is actually just an e-mail with a special header. This, however, requires all the people in the conversation to cooperate, i.e. use Outlook.

Hilarity ensues when someone tries to pretend that a message never existed by cancelling an e-mail sent outside Outlook's garden. (The non-Outlook user will get both the original and the "previous message doesn't exist, okay? Wink wink, nudge nudge" message.)
No. It's a great idea.

The author mentions "characterization tests," which document what the code actually does as opposed to what it "should" do, or what the documentation says it does. These kinds of tests are gold, especially if you go back through the bug tracker and create tests for the major bugs that have been fixed. Doing this gives you a good framework for constructing a regression test suite, which is what you really want when working with legacy code. It's like the opposite of TDD, because you want a green light to start, rather than RED -> GREEN -> REFACTOR.

OTOH, some code just isn't all that testable by its very nature. I'm thinking of stuff that requires expensive, custom hardware that would be difficult to mock out, for instance. Or GUI code. Or, if you're unlucky, like I was in a previous job... GUI code that requires specialized hardware.

Also keep in mind the amount of work it takes to make the code testable. You can easily end up breaking things just doing this if you're not careful or if the code is just not written with testability in mind.
That still does not stop the NSA from directly taking data from Yahoo.

and Man-in-the-middle attacks are still possible at least in the LAN using something like SSLStrip.
Ctrl-X Ctrl-E in bash will open an editor for the current command, which is executed when the editor is exited. After the potential for exploit was publicised a few months ago, I use this every time and it's really not much more effort than just pasting into the shell. As a bonus, it means I don't have to worry about embedded newlines stopping me from tweaking the command before running it.
My first thought was that having just a cross eliminates the ability to easily hit a diagonal on the D-Pad. I can't imagine it being easy than what was before.
Brilliant, now I guess I'll waste my time looking for Konami all over other Polygon big reviews.

Edit : PS4 Review too. http://www.polygon.com/a/ps4-review
The lawyer who sent that letter a. Got chewed out by the Browns owner for sending the missive, and b. has stated he was young and rash and regrets sending the response. However, the recipient of the response said he got a laugh out of it!

1. http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/browns.asp
I think this is a helpful action in some cases as well. Especially on teams where its less of a bug and more of a FAQ. Various questions about an application that are common and where to look for the answers. Saves everyone time.

For actual bugs. A lot of times they are one off, but if it is say an issue with a configuration or deployment that could come up again I definetly see the value there.
Finally, Apple can start building its massive new ‘spaceship’ campus
Every car is a compromise, be in it price, design, running costs, build quality, features etc.

Electric cars normally comprise range for running costs, the Model S's only real compromise is the high cost.
> I think people need to rid themselves of this romantic notion that the government serves "the people" and cops in particular are supposed to protect the innocent. Both of them are ridiculously childish beliefs. The reality is much harsher.

That may be so. But if we don't stick to these ideals and try to enforce them again, and again, and again we'll end up for sure in a much worse situation.
That's pretty much country dependent, local legislation on data protection varies. (And even then AFAIK is limited to sensitive data, such as race/religion/banking, not the password to some website...)
> built up certain social conventions

What?! There are no "built up social conventions" on SO, those were destroyed early on. There is only a toxic culture formed by the fiat of the great hypocrite Jeff Atwood, whose mouth championed "the community" while his jackboots curbstomped anything the community did that wasn't simple or mediocre enough for him to appreciate.
Take a look at Michael Feathers - Working Effectively With Legacy Code
|Unlike the PS4, there is absolutely no available functionality for the system until that update is performed.

Seriously?
Funny, I see a lot of closed questions on SO, but most of them are from HN links. When I google for a solution for a programming problem, I usually find a high-scoring (not closed) SO question with useful answers.
No, it won't be %20. It isn't encoded. You should mkdir or touch "name ", not "name%20".
Developing offline first
there is no such predefined thing as STDOUT.

you are probably thinking of STDOUT_FILENO. can you just put "1" there?

also, reordering the "mov"s (so they appear in actual call order: edx, ecx, ebx) will simplify the diagram somewhat.
The problem is that "publicly shamed" means "shamed amongst security geeks". Most websites main demographic is not security geeks.
Hey, I've got an idea: instead of betting for bitcoins, the loser has to send the winner a postcard admitting that they lost!
Up to date chrome on windows 7. The scrolling is broken because it dynamically loads content as you scroll.
http://coinvoice.com
I have no heating bill, ever. Waste heat just makes my apartment more uncomfortable.
It's a big step in the right direction.
Yes, the government would surely do a great job legislating development standards. Just look how terrifically they've handled software patents.
Hey, have you ever seen this thing called etherpad? it's pretty great. Some guys even took the research put into that and made a library anyone can use called shareJS[1]. It uses operational transforms, and yes, they're pretty hairy.. but they've been done, and now anyone can use that work.

Then you have the persistent data structures from clojure. Now I might be crazy, but it seems to me that those data structures are probably the most valuable contributions that language has made to our craft, and make the sort of things you're talking about-- not trivial, but a lot easier.

The whole trick is you have to start thinking 4-dimensionally- Which is difficult because our programming languages tend to have modify-in-place mutable state, when what we should have is variables that remember what they were at specific times, and algorithms that are able to merge conflicts seamlessly- not by locking but by recreating what would have happened if the two events had happened synchronously on the same system.

But then, you only really have to do that if what you're talking about is a multiuser system. You can do all this much easier if what you're willing to build is a simpler system. One that works like a one page JS app- JUST LIKE A DESKTOP APP, and only talks to the server at the point of "saving" or "synchronising" or whatever you want to call it. That's easy. You just program undo just like you do in a desktop app, and what you save to the server is a serialised history.

On the server, you have your git-like versioned databases for maximum undo. We know this can work because dropbox does it. If I delete a file on my machine... like REALLY delete it, dropbox still has it for 30 days.

Wikipedia articles have "infinite" undo.

And that's all web. that's all internats.

Fundamentally, once you have javascript, the html5 appcache, localStorage, what is the difference between the "web app" and the "native app" other than performance and some other native features irrelevant to undo?

the mobile apps still have to phone home to a server too now. Half the apps on the app store don't work without a net connection. What is the actual difference?

In fact, you could write a whole app that just downloads to the phone, runs entirely locally, doesn't talk to the server after the initial download, and runs in a browser. Why couldn't you have undo in that?

Well, why not. so I added it to my app pix.pe[2] when you press the back button. not exactly the most impressive example since you don't have much state to store... but what's the difference between doing it there, and doing the same thing in a native app? it's all just turing complete language code, with a storage mechanism and a way to draw on screen. Once you have those things there's nothing to stop you. Other than undo itself being kind of difficult already, regardless of what platform you're writing into.

[1]: http://sharejs.org/
[2]: http://pix.pe/
If you don't believe the United States is actually using its intelligence for fighting terrorism then you're just as delusional as the people you refer to. Of course the government abuses and misuses its power on its own people - but the evidence is clear that the government is fighting terrorism. Many of the leaks, going all the way back to wikileaks, confirm this - not to mention the body bags.
Honestly it depends entirely on the expected lifetime of the changed code and the complexity of the changes required.

If a particular application is just milking out another year or two until it's replaced, it's probably not worth erecting unit test scaffolding around the entire app. Sometimes it's safer to just change a couple constants and do a smoke test than to really get into it.

That said, my experience was that it was immeasurably helpful in breaking apart and working with older code - just taking a portion of my time devoted solely to writing unit tests helped my understanding beyond what you'd expect.
Feels like a perfect place to host your hobby projects but nothing for serious business
/cooling bill goes up
In code example, the hexdump starts with B9 90 00 00 08, but in the disassembly is listed as 80 00 00 90. I don't think endianness can change 08 to 80.
> Language evolution doesn't really happen much in literate societies like ours, so it's neat that we have an example unfolding before our eyes.

I believe that we write more than we ever did. But what we write is not literature but a written form of casual conversation (blog comments, forum posts, IM, IRC, email...). It seems to me that it is likely, on the contrary, to favour a faster evolution of the language; especially for international English.
Gravity esoteric programming language
I include an "Instant Login" link in each mail so the users don't need to remember their password. It contains a unique time-sensitive token to identify the user and instantly sign them in (much like a password reset). I learned this technique from OKCupid, so no idea why they still had plaintext passwords.
10 Surprising Facts About RAID
Glu Mobile Releases First Game for Google Glass
CSS3, Please: The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator
I hate these kind of arguments.

What OS are you running? If you trust your OS vendor enough to run their binaries as root then you shouldn't be too worried when they screenshot your machine every minute and post the images online so your family can see the kind of porn you watch...
Dealing with Timezones in Distributed Teams
> That's why I consider /r/programming a better place to find fruitful discussion than StackOverflow

There is also http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=65767
He was afraid to go to (A) any country with an extradition treaty with the United States (B) any US ally. It just goes to show that most of the countries of the world actually do like the United States I guess/or could've in his opinion been coerced to extradite him.
idiolect - now there's a word that sums up the language used in most comments on the internet :)
"Theil Fellow created his own nuclear fusion plant aged 14"?
not even German endianness ? ;)

thanks for pointing this out.
Free markets currently doing a pretty awful job of it as we keep learning. Perhaps some government legislation would help.
Yes but they're droplets in a Digital Ocean. In this specific case I think it works very well with their branding.

If they'd have called it a Virtual Private Dedicated Serverlet or invented yet another useless acronym (YAUA, of course) I'd be agreeing, but droplet is simple and easy and as a bonus helps avoid the immediate "This is too techy for me!" attitude you can get when trying to convince a shared server user that the reason their site keeps going offline is because they need to upgrade to something better
On Which Devices Should You Test Your App?
Wax on, Wax off
19 year old Thiel Fellow created his own nuclear fusion plant at age 14?
Realistically the problem with that isn't even MD5, it's the modal popup that hasn't changed in any browser since 1999.

It's so unbelievably popular, Chrome copied the behavior despite not existing in 1999. It's all over mobile, too...
I think it's a bit like saying all morbidly obese people can simply stop eating food and then they will lose weight. It's technically true, but it's unrealistic to the point of being vacuous in itself.

In this case saying "it isn't that simple" means that we live in a completely different world, and experience completely different aspirations and incentives than the person in the article. You and I might think it simple to abide by the terms of parole if we were ever arrested. However, in reality, the people discussed in the article, black people trapped in poverty, do get drawn towards crime and do find it hard to stick to their parole. If you think that means they are deficient as people, then that is more than a little self serving. You might as well puff yourself up and tell yourself they are poor because they deserve to be poor, not because they were born into it.

The simple truth is, if there is no incentive for a people to participate in mainstream society then it doesn't matter how hard you harry them, they won't participate. If jail seems like an inevitability, and meaningful work an impossibility, then the decision to inconvenience yourself in order to stick to the terms of your parole is not easy.

If you want to modify a person's behaviour through punishment, then bad behaviour has to be punished fairly and then forgiven, followed by a chance to earn rewards through good behaviour. The situation described in the article is one of nothing but punishment, with inevitable results.
It solves the problem with offline password cracking, but it introduces the need to trust a third party.

Since the client side of SRP can be implemented in Javascript [1,2,3], there's not really much in the way of compelling reasons not to use it.

[1]: There's a client in the SRP bundle at http://srp.stanford.edu/download.html

[2]: https://github.com/symeapp/srp-client

[3]: https://github.com/clipperz/javascript-crypto-library
I think it's a bit like saying all morbidly obese people can simply stop eating food and then they will lose weight. It's technically true, but it's unrealistic to the point of being vacuous in itself.

In this case saying "it isn't that simple" means that we live in a completely different world, and experience completely different aspirations and incentives than the person in the article. You and I might think it simple to abide by the terms of parole if we were ever arrested. However, in reality, the people discussed in the article, black people trapped in poverty, do get drawn towards crime and do find it hard to stick to their parole. If you think that means they are deficient as people, then that is more than a little self serving. You might as well puff yourself up and tell yourself they are poor because they deserve to be poor, not because they were born into it.

The simple truth is, if there is no incentive for a people to participate in mainstream society then it doesn't matter how hard you harry them, they won't participate. If jail seems like an inevitability, and meaningful work an impossibility, then the decision to inconvenience yourself in order to stick to the terms of your parole is not easy.

To modify a person's behaviour through punishment, then bad behaviour has to be punished fairly and then forgiven, followed by a chance to earn rewards through good behaviour. The situation described in the article is one of nothing but punishment, with inevitable results.
I say that because in my observation of companies' PR disasters after Wikipedia editing, the real-world idea of what constitutes COI is quite a bit broader than Wikipedia jargon "COI". Rules-lawyering doesn't convince the papers.

I've done a bit of work liaising with the nicer variety of PR person who really doesn't want to get it wrong - the above is my general advice in these cases.
Finally a teen, who can talk in non-bias way and without fallacies :) I wish this world would be like he is..
Androids Destroyed ~ ESET NOD32 SOLUTIONS
Why not setup your own? Dedicated servers are super affordable nowadays (if you are on HN, anyway).
They certainly put up a good show of it, but then they need to be able to justify the spending somehow. Historically though they've sponsored magnitudes of difference more terrorism around the world than they've prevented.
[Kickstarter] Sinatra Cookbook - Recipes for the Ruby framework
You don't need a college degree to get a job
I first learned Lisp so long ago that car and cdr are still ingrained in my head. first and last feel somehow wrong, to me.
You are looking at necessity products built by large corporations whose products are usually regarded as the best of breed in the market.

If you are a designer for instance, you'll most likely come to depend on Adobe Photoshop. That means at some point you've created an account. Adobe got breached and your data got leaked, you'll likely whine a little about it online but unless you are willing to:

- shift your work and relearn a new tool than Photoshop

- navigate your way around closing your account (with the assumption that your data is actually deleted after account closure) which is rather hard in most cases, no one likes losing users.

Then you'll likely just suck it up, do what you can and hope for the best.

On the other hand, you got small time (but growing - not web-scale yet-) services/products that can't really afford losing a large number of users. Those would worry most about security. Ironically, they'd stay off the grid for long enough and wont become attack targets until they make it big.

But that's just really the security industry, no system is 100% secure. And you never know if you've tightened your security enough until someone drills a hole. Then you patch it.

Any self respecting corporate will have a security auditing policy. The so called white-hat hackers or pen-testers. Good companies will run security audits every now and then in hope to discover new security holes introduced by software updates, system policy changes...etc.

As for legal pressure, it depends on what we are talking about. If you are a payment processing company then any data breach is a violation of your PCI compliance, which leads to a lot of bad PR and legal consequences.

If Facebook got breached and data was exposed, I doubt there is anything in the law that reacts to such issue. Unless someone sues Facebook for damages, then that's a whole different ball game.

The incentives are there for any business of all sizes. Legally? It depends. It's those schmucks that screw us all, plaintext passwords and shit.

Edit: Fixed formatting.
That did cross my mind, but his/her history looks legitimate. I think it's just an instance of the tendency that some people have to overly personify businesses.
Maybe simply emailing the password still has a higher conversion rate than the one time link, for example if the user does not see or understand the link or perhaps they want to login later when their email is not open.

It can be difficult to argue for security in cases where even small % of short term revenue might be affected.
I'm not sure what overall point I'm making but "evidence that bulk meta data is useful in catching terrorists" is a pretty high bar.

There is very little terrorism in the US, compared to other violent crimes like murder or rape. It's a little harder to quantify because most deaths & injuries were due to one event. Potential mega events like nuclear terrorism or another 9/11 scale event are possible are even more black swanish. But in an average year there is virtually none. Terrorism & counter-terrorism are mostly emotional, the emotional impact of a terrorist attack carries more weight.

What would effective even look like? Reducing the number of yearly incidences from 6 to 4? Making arrests?
capital structure is the killer. Many startups just die because of the over-greedy investors.
You have no idea what you're talking about, sit down. Hong Kong is nothing like China and the reasons he did it were well-documented and well-reasoned. I don't think you'd do something much less "ironic" if your government was threatening your ass.
The most effective way is to fail and taste defeat.
Uh, if that's supposed to be C, then there's no STDOUT and the way to compute the length of a string is with strlen(), not len(). It should be STDOUT_FILENO as pointed out below.
A more optimistic prediction is that a UBI would encourage the development of more low-income housing.
If you really agree with this article (and you are uncomfortable with learning a new language) you should really learn other, different, languages (hit: Java won't do).
> Here's an example of StackOverflow working for a fairly deep question, about the maximal possible asymptotic slowdown due to purely functional programming

But there is (now) a better SE site for this: http://cs.stackexchange.com/
afdfawesergsdf
Installing lastpass on every machine I happen to stroll by and want to use isn't the cleanest of solutions... and I shouldn't have to trust my keys to one closed, proprietary application. With a standard protocol at least I'd have a choice about my client.

There are also peripheral issues with password databases, like the fact that they make the mere fact that you're using one transparent to anyone investigating your activities.
Safari on 10.9 does this.
Calling the other names for making a (non offensive to anyone in particular) remark, just because he used a notion your particular culture finds "taboo"?

Not to mention the irony of being offended by the mere use of the word "rape" (to correctly describe the feeling of being continuously probed after repeteadly saying "no", without trying to offend anyone), while in the same time you find it acceptable to comment on his mental state ("crazy idiot", "deranged" etc), as if mental health issues are funny.

Is that what you consider responsible behavior?

Or were you just conditioned to think people using the "r" word are to be prosecuted, however innocent and justified their use?