skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been working with Ruby and RoR for a few years now after using C# and Java. I now can put together web apps or APIs in hours vs days and integrate it with about anything out there from other APIs, using gems wrapping them or other gems for integration like redis, rabbitmq etc you name it. I have never ran into issues of incompatible gems I could not fix myself in a short period of time. It's incredible productive and reasonable fast. I am dealing with data reads/writes in the ten thousands of records per second and when something smells like bottleneck you still can throw in a native extension or use jruby and call java libs. If you are building all you do with boilerplate activerecord or other ORMS you just don't use it right. Flexibly is key. I think every challenge has it's best tools. I tried grails, play, spring mvc and other frameworks but promise that I can beat every of these frameworks in terms of development speed. Ruby is far from being dead and has a huge community. Having that said its always good to also stay up to date with other tools. For many deploying rails apps is a pain so why not throwing in warbler and deploy a war file to an app server...seconds later, boom, online and scalable. I could go on for hours:) I am a fan and so are our shareholders.
Money as a form of credit is zero sum. For example on the other side of every US dollar is debt security (government or mortgage) that the Fed has bought. Money only has meaning if someone (maybe indirectly) owes you that money.
But it is correct that absolute wealth (or what economists call utility) is not zero sum. To focus on relative wealth is to invite unhappiness that no one or system can help. We don't live in Lake Woebegone.
I don't think it's that hard, if you have high-level people involved in the hiring process and you're not stingy with pay and benefits.

You need enough of a draw to get a competitive applicant pool, and enough people who have sufficient talent to judge it.

Most companies err by hiring based on specialty, e.g. "we need exactly 3 data scientists and that's it". If you're looking for generally good people and willing to accept the variability that comes with that, and you have a managerial environment that provides multiple avenues to success (which is the definition of a good management environment) rather than multiple ways to fail, I think it's not that hard.
I can only just barely imagine the things you're talking about as real things that really happen. Surely they can only happen to other people - to another class of people. My parents didn't put any of us through college. I don't have a family and don't expect to. Sometimes I forget these things are real for some people. I think of them the same way most people think of fame and riches.
No ... this was in the late '80s or early '90s. We were a contract engineering shop and these were the only weapon parts we ever made. Most of my work was much more rewarding (Controllers for thermal storage systems, Opthalmic Ultrasounds, Controllers for nuclear reactors, etc).
A world full of brilliant cryptographers outraged at the NSA, trying to get the NSA off the IETF crypto review board, working on publishing results about NSA-sponsored crypto... and you want to talk about the MD2 and RC2 constants? What's the largest system that ever relied on MD2? Let's start there.
I thought this post would be about jobs for 'unicorns' designer + developers positions conjoined.

That's what I want. A job where I won't be dictated by designers who can't implement their bullshit photoshop mockups.

I'm not an entrepreneur, but I like to create things. I am OK with a paycheck (where eating out on McDonalds is a luxury) with no equity, hell that's my current situation - sans creative freedom. Right now I'm a code monkey, and I kinda hate it, so I'm hoping that would change in the future. Just need a project without the photoshop-guy.

That being said, creating my own tech demos on my own free time helps keep my sanity in check
Did you have an actual opinion about what he was saying in the essay, or do you just want to talk about how he chose to write it?
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Experience as a merchant. If we give Amex reasonable evidence that merchandise was received and a chargeback is unwarranted, there is a chance they will find in our favor, whereas Visa/Mastercard take the consumer's side almost unconditionally.

I suspect this because Amex is better staffed in this area.
no.

the music recording is the manifestation of the performance/service. so, not viable as a product.

cd players perform the service of playing the music. (aka automates the performance) totally viable as a product.

think of it like a many-to-one relationship. the "one" is what can be productized. the "many" cannot. scarcity is key for what can be economically considered product-viable.
The legit strategies you are suggesting require that you have a significant value add to offer. If that is the case your best bet is to ignore search engine traffic altogether - be happy when you get it but don't care when you don't get it.

However if you are looking to make money and you don't have a value add to offer, it's very easy to quickly throw together a website, plaster some ads, do blackhat SEO, and very quickly make a lot of money while only working 10 hours/week since you don't have to actually worry about providing anyone anything of value (and it's not like doing blackhat SEO is that difficult to do).

Because of the above, if you are strictly looking at ROI and SEO is one of your main sources for traffic (which would be the case for a lyrics site) it makes a lot more sense to focus your efforts on SEO than it does to focus your efforts on creating an awesome website.

Edit: For whoever downvoted me, if you think I'm wrong I'd love to hear why.
Most practitioners would recommend Nacl now.
I just published a short post with some data http://www.rocketmill.co.uk/hideous-seo-strategy-rap-genius
What recent RSA news? The Reuters thing? RSA-the-algorithm has nothing whatsoever to do with RSA-the-company.

(It is good that they are moving away from RSA; new systems should stop using RSA.)
I believe your assertions about the 1950s need substantiation. I'd like to see some empirical data about things like poverty levels, life expectancy, job security, bankruptcy, and so on.

Keep in mind that this is only a couple of decades (at most) from the Great Depression. Even if the 1950s were clearly better, it's a rather cherry-picked data point considering how much worse the 1930s clearly were.

That being said, I'm not too excited about the intangibles of the 1950s. The Korean War was in the 1950s and Jim Crow was in full swing. Life expectancy was much lower. Just about any consumer good from today is clearly superior to the 1950s equivalent.
Yes, wealth can be created. But creation of wealth isn't uniformly distributed, And beyond all it is a zero sum game at constant points in time.
Project Euler is great--it's how I first dove into Python too--but it will lead you down a very different path than these practice projects. I like to think of it as a constructivist curriculum in algorithms and data structures, whereas these practice projects seem to take much more of a "just write code that works" philosophy.
You are 100% correct. Thank you.
> The average 1950s family only owned one car, while the average family of today owns more than one (likely, to support the second job)

Actually, it's an even greater difference than that. The median household income in 1955 was about $4k, while today it's about $50k. In 1955 the cheapest Ford cost about $2k, or half the median household income, whereas today the cheapest Honda costs about $16k, or a little less than a third of median household income.

If we just leave it at that, it sounds like things are about the same. However, the cheapest Honda today comes with airbags, air conditioning, power windows and locks, an FM radio, and a whole host of other features that were luxuries reserved for the most expensive cars (if they were even available at all). On top of that, my (and others') experience with modern Hondas is that they can easily go for 200k miles without major repairs or tune-ups, whereas 100k miles was considered a major achievement for a Ford of that era. Realistically, this difference in longevity alone means that a car from the 1950's cost about three times as many working hours as a car of today.
Mark Jason Dominus is a Perl guru -- it would probably be a surprise to see him write it in anything other than Perl; among other things, he wrote the book, "Higher Order Perl", which is basically SICP for Perl or, as he describes it: "Higher-Order Perl is about functional programming techniques in Perl. It's about how to write functions that can modify and manufacture other functions."

(The book is available for free online, btw:
http://hop.perl.plover.com/

There's a link there to a page translating the concepts into Javascript, btw -- there's a similar link for Ruby but it doesn't work, nor does a revised link -- changes the word "category" to "categories" in the URL -- that I found Googling, but this does:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130315020240/http://blog.grayp... )
The Side Effects of Ganoderma Lucidum Extract
This was a fun read but I think the author is overthinking. How about: there are people in the world, quite a few of them, who like Nickelback. A "Refuse to play Nickelback" feature mocks and insults them. It's a little weird to feign surprise over that.
I can't believe a VC backed company has done this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo
Many retailers don't take Amex because they charge higher fees, not because they are consumer friendly (which they are).

In my experience, Amex is more likely to respond to a merchant presenting evidence that a chargeback is unwarranted. Visa/Mastercard essentially just say "tough luck," except in the case that a consumer has charged back by mistake.
Ah yes, you're right. I didn't think far enough into it before I pushed the initial commit. I guess I was just excited, but this is perhaps one of the most important changes that need to be made. Thank you for bringing this to the forefront of my mind, it will be a new convention now.
We ask for twitter so that people don't write everything that is in their mind (dumb stuff, test messages or insulting text). By signing in with a service like twitter we can at least try to reduce the number of such messages.
Bloomberg anchor gets Bitcoin on live TV and is promptly robbed by a viewer
That is true, I was referring solely to Target where it was physical transactions. There are other solutions that can be implemented for card not present transactions.
Nacl or libsodium?
i know you have the intellectual curiousity of a sausage, but some of us are simply interested. we don't all need to be motivated by logic.

how would you derive it? tagging pairs of hex digits and sorting doesn't cut it. would rivest have used a hack that's a biased shuffle? i doubt it.

and downvotes. happy xmas!
You forgot to open the the sarcasm tag :)
Looks interesting. Thanks for the tip. Need to verify that it's also good for "non-natural" or traditional point and click GUI's.
Snapchat Exploits and API documentation
I bought three small ones from http://www.helipal.com recently. They come pre-tested so when you crash them, you know you're the one who threw them all out of alignment.

A proper quadcopter is different than those styrofoam quadrotor things you see. A copter will take longer to learn how to not crash, but you have more precise control.
This might be a midwest thing but the police departments around me (Milwaukee, WI suburbs) will chase down something as insignificant as a kid using their friend's parent's credit card to buy a hundred dollars of Xbox points online.
I'm glad to hear that the basic ffOS phones perform better than low-mid-range feature phones.

I don't think my initial post made it very clear, but my critique of the ZTE Open was based on what the reviewer said (so basically hearsay) and he didn't seem impressed with that phone compared to his old Nokia.

I'm very excited about ffOS, and do hope for its success.

What made me jump with my initial post was the way you were excusing its shortcomings. Saying "it's not Mozilla/ffOS fault" that this and that don't work is a very dangerous stance to take. It is also one that most consumers will not understand.

I very much appreciate this comeback. Very good points.
That was Jesus' big shtick. He defected from the "governments" to the "people". Broadening the possibility of salvation from the Jews to the Gentiles, transitioning the focus of spirituality from the Roman material world to the heavenly next. By simply sharing information.

It's no different from what Snowden has done. You want to know why the US wants to crucify him? That's why.

He's a messiah. Just like Obama was 5 years ago.
There were certificates (including a root CA) using MD2 until recently. MD2 itself was only retired in 2011 [1].

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6149.txt
It was huge, and rushed because they had to beat the clock of the potential coming of a hostile Republican House. Even champions of the bill in Congress admitted that it would take years to fully understand what the bill does. The mind reels.

The law was a horrifically complicated moronicy for a very specific reason that it is important to call out. The law was formulated to satisfy the numerous semi-monopolistic rent-taking interests already well entrenched in the field (especially the health insurance companies but also including other players. The final bill was written by an ex-high official of some big insurance company as I recall).

It is important to not ascribe anything like good intentions to those who went through this exercise. If we are very lucky, the new regime will allow hospitals and insurance companies to extract our money in a more orderly fashion and thus we may find ourselves benefiting in a relative sort of way. But we should never speak of better organized vampirehood as having a similarity to good intentions (the US will continue to spend twice what other industrialized nations spend on health care going forward).
Datacoin
The average worker works 37 hours these days, because of a big shift to part-time no-benefits jobs. So, you've got people working 30 hours to make ends meet, and you've got people working 50 because 'that's what's expected if you want to go anywhere.'
Poor mental health = a low quality of life
You are obviously right. Now I feel dumb. I concede the importance of MD2.

Do you believe that the starting state for MD2 is a possible backdoor?

Later: I'm batting .000 today on this stuff; it's not the starting state of MD2 that he's talking about, of course, and the misapprehension that he was is part of why I was dismissive. Go me.
Isn't solutions/application architecture a kind of unicorn job by this definition?
If we're even coming close to Watson, should we also feed the Countdown bot the contents of Urban Dictionary [1]?

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-w...
Their business depends on their search engine ranking position (SERP’s) on Google.

Am I the only one who thought, "SERP," meant, "Search Engine Result Page?"
As is the case with other products and services from other countries. Tax the local businesses that are benefitting from the ads and services.
I cannot choose that Apple not pay campaign contributions to senators. It is not the only thing money does, but it does buy zero-sum power.
This isn't entirely snarky. The ACCORD trial was a spectacular failure (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0802743). Nobody really knows why (as far as I know), but since high blood glucose is known to cause problems, and lowering it by giving extra insulin does not seem to help (remember that type-2's usually have high spectacularly insulin levels to begin with), we've got to consider other approaches.

Avoiding carbs seems to both normalize glucose and lower insulin in type-2s, so it's not a dumb approach. On the other hand, a low carb diet tends to increase insulin resistance, so if it turns out that both the glycemia and insulin levels are not the cause of the adverse symptoms, but rather symptoms in themselves, going low carb may make everything much worse. (e.g. it might make the numbers we can measure look better, while worsening whatever metabolic abnormality is causing the diabetes in the first place)
The interesting thing is: One fundamental concept in my head is: If you don't negotiate the price of your service early on, I'm growing suspicious.

In a buisness context, people are either excited enough to be scary, or they have a material reason to do things. This tends to boil down to complicated reasons, or money. So if someone is upfront about just wanting money, I suppose he is fine, as long as I pay him well or he has little ability to backstab me.

Thus, I like this attitude, I have to say. Get clear about what you give me and what I give you, so this roadblock is out of the way.
They would be tempted, but then I can't have a drone land in their yard with a bow attached :)
We are a website like any other out there that asks for permissions to your account. It's up to you if you trust us or not.
The Russians tried that in Afghanistan - but I suspect that if china has some decent SF like the Spetnaz they could take out the leadership in a decapitation strike and put their own guys in and it would probably work cant see there being much resistance from the local population as opposed to Afganistan.
I'm type 1 too, there's potential, but the same problem with degradation exist. If you eat something that slows down or speeds up digestion or alters it in any way, it could give you a lot of highs and lows. It's like how certain foods take longer for the carbs to be absorbed and cause lows first then highs later. Alcohol could be effected even more too.
The Matasano crypto challenges are a great place to start getting your feet wet and your hands dirty.

http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/

Myself, I'm trying them in ANSI C
Have Webmail Users Gone Mobile?
Yes! This is exactly what I was going to post. The article's recommendation to read Applied Cryptography and the HAC to "learn the theoretical background" left me dejected, since neither is particularly that great in the area of theoretical underpinnings. (The HAC is a reference book, for Chrissake!) Both are great books in their own right, but they're not what I'd recommend for the theoretical background.

Katz and Lindell's Introduction, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic for the task (this was its design goal...). It introduces theoretical cryptography from the bottom-up and uses it to motivate the various primitives and constructions from the applied realm. It's really a great mix. The book has become my go-to recommendation for those who are serious about cryptography but have had relatively little exposure to it. It also doesn't assume the reader is an expert in all things computer science, which is nice.

Goldreich's Foundations of Cryptography is more of a treatise on theoretical cryptography... it goes much deeper and starts out assuming the reader is pretty familiar with concepts from theoretical computer science and probability theory. The optional sections of Katz and Lindell's work end up being the opening chapters of the first volume --- and they're not optional. Block ciphers aren't even treated until the second book. It's a seriously theoretical series, which makes it great in its own right, but I would postpone reading it until well-after Katz and Lindell's book. (And a book on computational complexity, at minimum, for those not familiar with it.)
In the next release, "due to popular demand", he should remove the feature and add in an "only play nickleback" feature.
> Wear sunglasses indoors

Here is the thing: I don't. That you think I must is extremely telling however.

I just don't have trouble grappling with the concept of people who are unlike myself. It is not hard for me to conceive of people who dress unlike me for non-utilitarian reasons. That is what fashion is. Further, I don't have to subscribe to a particular fashion to recognize those fashions for what they are; fashions.

Who is really too far "nerd/asspergered" here (seriously, your comments are so steeped in irony it is absurd...)? The person who cannot comprehend that fashion is not about utility and cannot stand those who are unlike him? Or the person who calling that intolerant, fashion-ignorant, bullshit.

Fashion is about more than utility. Your particular way of dressing is not the best way of dressing; stop dreaming up pop-psych self-aggrandizing bullshit to make yourself feel superior. Not everyone who calls you on your shit participates in the fashion trends which you vilify. Grow up.
I get that you need to learn how to break software as a major part of the learning process. I also understand that a broken system often can't be fixed, and that if your system breaks you might have to start from scratch. But does one go from becoming an expert at breaking systems to automatically churning out a secure cryptographic system? Or does one become an expert at breaking and then build a bunch of flawed crypto systems, as the learning process continues?

Maybe the process is just counterintuitive, but it seems that no matter how skilled someone might be at breaking systems, that building a sound system on the first try would still be incredibly difficult. I know that crypto systems aren't built iteratively, instead I'm talking about going back to the drawing board each time. Would there be value in that, or would it be a waste of time? I'm not yet an expert (and I am well aware that you are), though I aspire to be one day. Perhaps you would be kind enough to elaborate?
Don't learn by building. You need to learn by breaking.

The best way to do this is to do the Matasano crypto challenges. The challenges are designed to get progressively more difficult, and since the goal of most of them is to break something, that means you'll learn how to employ progressively more sophisticated attacks. They're also great for a newbie, because in one challenge you'll implement something that seems impervious to attack, then in the following challenge you'll attack and break it, often via an unexpected attack vector. (The padding oracle attack comes to mind.)

You'll come away with an understanding of AES in ECB CBC and CTR modes; HMAC; timing attacks; attacks on RNGs; attacks on hashes; and a lot more. That's just off the top of my head.

For me, there were a dozen "aha!" moments in the first 30 challenges. Each of those moments now live with me and inform my future decisions. They will also make you much less confident in your ability to design secure cryptosystems, which is good.