skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article brings up some interesting points (third party verification). FB not going after the money is quite interesting too. Are they too afraid to have to defend in court how the charge is valid?

If it gets to court, terms about not having third party audits are unlikely to be worth the paper they're not printed on to Facebook. The customer's lawyers are presumably going to use whatever discovery process applies before the case is heard to open up every can of worms they can find, and Facebook are presumably going to have no choice but to comply with requests for information even if they'd prefer to keep it to themselves.

If the customer's lawyers discover evidence of systematic failures (intentional or otherwise) and get that information into the public record, the resulting damage to Facebook could be astronomical. The risk doesn't necessarily come only from the original case. It could lead to things like class action suits, or even investigation for criminal fraud that could have FB executives personally facing jail time, depending on which legal system(s) applied. Conceivably, that could pose an existential threat to Facebook itself, though I'd be very surprised if anything that serious was going wrong and they hadn't discovered and dealt with it themselves.

Assuming the above is approximately correct in whatever jurisdiction applied to the original dispute/law suit, I imagine you'd have to be talking orders of magnitude more money before it was worth it for FB to fight a well funded, determined opponent who has real evidence on their side in court. With their war chest, I'd expect settling out of court if necessary and then dropping the matter as quickly and quietly as possible to be their preferred option under almost any realistic conditions.
I don't think that's true. To take one example, Steve Jobs famously gamed the organ donor system by buying houses in many states in order to get on multiple statewide registries. Now, most medical treatments aren't zero-sum in the way of organ transplants, but let's not pretend rich people can't buy better health than the rest of us.
Microsoft gives reference design for Windows Phone, announces nine new OEMs
I think it's more a matter of that's probably the most anyone is getting tipped per week and they assumed it would be more. The same way people assume that flattr and similar services adds up to meaningful amounts of money on a regular basis for the large projects that use it.
The economics of jail breaking
SRP [1] is a very nice alternative for storing password hashes in the database. As an added bonus, it prevents MITM attacks which steal user passwords before they reach your servers. Meteor [2] JS framework successfully uses SRP for authentication.

[1] http://srp.stanford.edu

[2] http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_loginwithpassword
No Perl example? Sob :(
> No, who is retorting to hyberbole? Did he say anything about them being incapable to carry out any action competently?

Yes.

> Would you expect anything else from the US gov't?

You're being obtuse to continue this line of pseudo-intellectual reasoning. His statement is quite obviously implying that the government can't do anything right (aww shucks!), and he's using this article as his "evidence."
I'm saying that the gun is what gives them power. They shouldn't abuse their power, but it's hard to argue with someone that will end your life if they decide to.

The cemetery is full of brave people. I'd much prefer to live, even if that means taking a little abuse for a few moments.
Not to discount research and the potential benefits of drugs for individual use cases, but why fight the symptoms (apparent lack in motivation) with drugs instead of the cause. Why not figure out how to organize things in a way that less people struggle with these kinds of things in the first place.
I'd try it if I had a keyboard for mine. I've written loads on a 10" netbook; it's a great environment IMHO because it's so portable.
Biotechnology is an infant, like computers at the 50s. Why should we not expect huge progress from it?

Now, I guess he'll have to redo his AI extrapolations. Chip manufacturing is now mature, and while we'll probably be only slightly latter at the computers that put 70% of the population out of a job, the current smaller rate of improvement will make a lot of difference for his 2029 prevision.
It's more targeted at people who do not know C. Koenig argues that building on C knowledge to learn C++ is a bad idea. They discuss this in the preface of the book.
Medium Feels Like The Good Old Days of Blogging
Now give me a filter

has unsubscribe link > mark as spam
I like this book especially if you are new to programming: Jumping into C++
Air Hockey Robot – a 3D printer hack
If the fact that a field might change some where else in your code is a "maintainability" issue, you have bigger issues and shouldn't be doing anything with passwords.

Private User Data should not be changed by many things. That is "PRIVATE" and therefore should be under tighter control than the rest of your data.
If it's designed simple, it will be simple to use. So it's the same thing.
That's the problem with OS software - it's very hard to make money with it. I have a startup developing a library for web automation. First question people asked when I posted it here: "why is this not open source and why the fuck do I need to pay?".
I like the C++ Primer (I actually prefer it to Stroudstrup) and this book does start from a basic example - describing what a function is.

I think that using the Primer to learn programming would be a hellish experience but then learning C++ as a first language is never going to be fun.
Generators definitely have their place. They're good for prototyping, and creating internal tools. Tasks that are time sensitive and can really benefit from eliminating boilerplate code.

Larger LOB, or public facing apps require more thought and planning to ensure that they get the job done right.
The Way of Giving and Taking
>That's easily fixed at home by buying an external monitor and keyboard/mouse (not a big expense, especially when you're no longer paying for transportation and coffee).

Sure, but the take away is, a lot of people just don't care, so the cafe is not that different for them.

>There are much better technical solutions for this than using horrible wifi. There are lots of software options out there for blocking distracting sites.

But then you can disable the software itself. I've tried those stuff, from pomodoro to internet site killers. Nothing works like absolutely having crap or no internet. See also various posts about how plane trips are so productive for coding and such.

>I'm talking about the standard coffee shops all across America that people are currently working out of.

Well, doesn't happen that much in those either. You can either go to one that's less populated, or you can always bring a tine 2-socket plug-expander with you (don't know how they're called in english).
Reading that last sentence gave me an idea for a SaaS company that (for a small monthly fee) marks and lets you purge suspicious fans of your page. Too bad it's impossible to get a list of your page's fans: https://developers.facebook.com/x/bugs/147185208750426/
They still are paid from the same source though.
Why is it awful? All new technologies initially cost tons of money. It is the rich early adopters who keep them afloat long enough so that there's time to make them cheaper and within reach of them masses, when scale advantages kick in. But if nobody buys it when it's too expensive, there might just not be a chance to develop it to the point when it's affordable.

Why is it not only bad, but worst you can think of? I, for one, can think of much worse things than immortal Bill Gates, however annoying it may be for some. Just turn on the news and watch long enough, I'm sure you'll see some of it. Then head to the library and open any 20th century history books. I guarantee you you'll find things much worse than an annoyingly long-living billionaire - such as genocide a of millions, for example. And not once but multiple times.

>>> Don't be surprised if they realize there isn't enough room for the rest of us.

Why there wouldn't be enough room for the rest of us?
There are people who get considerably more than that on Gittip, though it's true most people don't. ESR isn't that active a coder anymore, and afaict he hasn't spent much time advertising his Gittip either, so it's extremely passive income on his part.

The Gittip front page lists the top recipients, who are in the $150-650/wk range. The top few recipients are actually making the equivalent of a modest salary solely from Gittip contributions ($500/wk = $26k/yr).
Not really. If you mean actual password recovery, then I'd consider the site broken anyhow. If you mean password reset - any site worth its salt in security displays the same message regardless. Usually something like "If the account was found, an email will be sent shortly." I ran into one recently that simply said "An email has been sent" regardless of what was entered, which threw me off a bit as I was entering the wrong email address for that site and wondering why I wasn't getting their email....
Just because you can unsubscribe from something doesn't mean it's spam. Your statement just means that you don't know what "spam" actually means.
Old enough to have sense
123
ff
We've had already launched companies applying almost since the beginning of YC. Airbnb, which was in the winter 2009 batch, had been launched for over a year.

We make a conscious effort not to be influenced by early progress though, because there is no correlation between how far along a company is when they apply to YC and how well they end up doing.
The response you're receiving seems normal if you're targeting developers.
They've been trained by unethical spam senders that unsubscribing doesn't work.
The answer: http://www.cartalk.com/content/prison-switcharoo-0?answer
So your entire impression of San Francisco's history comes down to a few years of stuff related to the recent economic situation? You might want to expand your horizons a bit.

Consider the beats, the hippies, the summer of love, the gay and lesbian rise, Burning Man, and the rise of cycling. And hey, the web. Having lunch in South Park with the Wired folks in 1997, I sure didn't notice any hostility from the neighbors.

The obvious difference to me in these lists, beyond the time scale, is the use of power. That a ~$200 billion communications oligopoly gets a little pushback while trying to increase their market dominance is not something I'm going to shed a lot of tears over, and I don't think you can reasonably call it a smoking gun for generalized resistance to change.
I have been through few lectures and found it ok. Some people complain that it does not use standard library.
This is a refreshingly honest answer, and I completely relate to it. I spent a lot of money on a nice desk at home, but I still get more done in coffee shops.
That isn't anywhere near the most anyone is getting per week on Gittip. The front page currently features at least 12 people getting over $100/wk.

Even if ESR is doing anything worth being paid for (he certainly thinks so), I think at least some people would hesitate on the grounds of his controversial political positions.
This is one place I think Solaris (and Illumos) is still ahead. Not only do they have a full privilege system, but there is an easy to use CLI tool, ppriv(1), to control privileges on a per-process basis. You can start a process but drop its network privileges, or its file-write privileges (with some files possibly whitelisted), or its ability to spawn other processes, etc.. There's also a "privilege debug" mode so if the process crashes as a result, you can figure out what prohibited stuff it was trying to do. That allows an approach of just dropping all privileges to start, and then whitelisting a few things it needs.

FreeBSD's 'capsicum' and Linux's 'seccomp' look like they can conceptually do the same thing, but afaict there isn't yet a good command-line interface to them that lets you drop privileges of unmodified binaries.
The issue is with the ones that don't have a unsubscribe link and ask you to send them a fax or mail them to be unsubscribed.
Create Instagram Filters
At the risk of getting downvoted, I'm more surprised that he's earning that much.

Frankly, ESR hasn't contributed that much to the FOSS world, (either as a coder or as an activist) in the last 5-10 years (ie, since 2009/2004), compared to the late 90s/early 2000s.

Nowadays, the only times I hear about him are when he actively trolls the GNU listserv, which is simply counterproductive and only hurts both the free software and open source movements.

For evidence, look at the search results, ordered by date, for "ESR" and mentally filter out the ones that are posts of old articles or have too few points to make the front page: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ESR#!/story/sort_by_date/0/ESR. The two biggest recent posts were ones where he tries to get the FSF and/or GNU projects to "admit" that "open source" is superior. Fortunately, IIRC, both were flagged off the front page relatively quickly (possibly for setting off the flamewar detector).
It seems there is a small but very strong subculture of HackerNews readers who enjoy reading and discussing mathematical things. I would love to have a separate feed of those stories (and then after I'm done I could browse the HN front page), and I have often thought about the possibility of writing a program to do that.

DataTau (the HN for data mining) seems to have failed, so I imagine a filter is the way to go rather than make a new website.
But is there really a clear moral achievement in solving death? As long as we can procreate faster than we can increase the yield of resources for allowing quality of life there will always be a potentiality of more people than we can support. Then we have the problem of figuring out how to distribute those resources in the most morally efficient way. Living longer means taking more of those resources for yourself.
A programmer's brain on code
Sure they can, but I think of it as rich people subsidizing the medical research for the rest of us. It trickles down, and as the progress continues, there's always another new expensive thing for rich people to pay for.

As for the organ transplants; somebody needs to pour more money into stem cell research and related fields so that we can start growing organs, thus eliminating the whole organ market (including the black one) and zero-sum dynamics of transplats.
I'd be interested in corresponding with you about this problem but I don't know your email.
Neiman Marcus Hackers Set Off Nearly 60K Alarms
Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month".

:)

Don't be silly. This is hacker news.

I am not cynical. I have always wondered why they haven't been more aggressive with respect to such lists. They are potential competition. And, while it would be unethical to filter such mailings, it is in their and in the user's interest to make it easy to unsubscribe from such lists. For users, so that they don't have to go through some annoying steps to unsubscribe, for them to improve their spam filter and to increase the value of GMail ads.

By the way, let's not pretend that many of their choices are made to maximise ad revenue, since that is currently their main source of income. And I think it's perfectly fine. The vast majority wants free services and ads are a good way to monetise them. If you don't want ads and/or data mining, there are good alternatives for a few dollars a month.
1. It's per week.

2. Even well-known, active coders only receive ~$200/week. The creator of Drupal looks like the highest-paid coder at $420 (I know Chad Whitacre is a coder but I'm guessing much of his compensation is for his valuable work on gittip?).

3. Yes, we've all read Cathedral and the Bazaar -- an influential work in hacker and open source culture. And we've all read his opinionated guide on how to be a hacker. But I had never heard or used any of his listed tools: reposurgeon, deheader, coverity-submit, irkerd, doclifter, and cvs-fast-export. Also, it's not clear if he wrote those or maintains them. I'm sure the GPS and gif libraries he maintains are important, but I wasn't personally familiar with them.

My point is: what is Eric S. Raymond doing these days, other than maintaining a few interesting repos? And why do we owe him a living?
Heml.is looks promising - if it ever launches
> Show me where it says that PostgreSQL is the default.

FAQ: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/faq/install/#what-are-...

> you’ll also need a database engine. PostgreSQL is recommended, because we’re PostgreSQL fans

geoDjango (bundled): https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/gis/instal...

> PostGIS is recommended

the migration document also clearly notes that postgres has the best migration support, although it does not outright recommend it (probably because migration is generally an afterthought and production database has already been decided by then)
A calculated value means you need source to figure it out. Only PHP and JS/Node scripters assume that their source isn't safe in an attack. The rest of us assume that our compiled code is safe.

(Over generalization, but if people can get your source code basically there is zero you can do to keep them out)

Storing data in more than one store is a best practice.

Your random 128 bits have to be stored somewhere. That means an attacker needs only the database, not the source. In any large scale environment you likely have multiple machines. When a machine gets taken out of service at your hosting provider your database might still be on it when it hits the dumpster. If your source code is on another machine it doesn't matter.

The same is true of the Private User Data and the passwords. two locations means you need two breaches to do anything.
Oh yeah, "Don't Be Evil"...
Good to know, thanks a lot for the info.
We're publishing out ideas that can eventually be turned into a startup here: http://www.blazingx.com
The first "real" release is coming up in the next few weeks. The proof of concept demo we released in December is updated semi-regularly and available here: https://github.com/flynn/flynn-dev

Not long to wait for the real thing!
Around here most of them have a place where you can eat, but conference-calling is more of a problem. Some libraries do have private "study rooms" or "meeting rooms" you can book (intended for students working on group projects and the like, who need a more enclosed space where making noise is ok), but I haven't looked into it.
A good introduction to the Linux file system hierarchy for the uninitiated. Thanks for sharing.
There's a couple, actually. G-Ear Player is totally native, and then there's gTunes and omPlayer. Yours is the only one that's open source though. Nice!
Here's the best solution I've heard for this:

The prisoners meet together and designate a leader. The leader will maintain a tally. They also designate one of the switches to not matter. The prisoners then use the following strategy:

When a prisoner is lead to the room, if the designated switch is off and it is the prisoner's first time flipping the relevant switch, it is turned on. Else, flip the irrelevant switch. If the prisoner is the designated leader, and the relevant switch is on, he adds a count to his tally and turns the relevant switch off. Otherwise he just flips the irrelevant switch. This way, once the leader has seen the light be on a sufficient number of times he can definitively say that they have all been in the room.
You choose on a first come first served basis.
The cycle of messanging.

"We need a way to communicate over the internet". Email was born.

"We need a way to communicate with groups". Messaging boards and mailing lists are born.

"We need a way to communicate quickly and privately". Email is now only a tool for spam, registration mails and professionalism. AIM, ICQ and MSN are born. Email lists are "when you click on that list button in Outlook" to the general public.

"We need a way to communicate on the go". Messaging boards die. People use Facebook to chat. Twitter grows. Old-style protocols can't keep up despite offering more. SMS is that thing that does exactly the same but costs money.

"We need a way to communicate with groups again". No one was using boards anymore so no one developed new and edgy alternatives. Discourse is born. Nothing new is offered, but JavaScript! Ajax! Frameworks! Apps!

"We need a way to communicate quickly and privately again". Old protocols are reinvented. Poorly. WhatApps and competitors arise. People using XMPP and OTR die of loneliness. Solved problems are solved again. Poorly. But now there's an app for that. Even on Windows Phone (never seen one in the wild).

Time to reinvent Email. Or not.
> "I believe that it's just a mistake and I feel very bad for whomever might have slipped"

There has been such a rush from many places to cast this as a "mistake". We just don't know whether this was deliberate or a mistake, anything else is just an opinion. I don't see one explanation being less likely than the other, it's annoying to see one explanation being pushed more than the other.
There's a well known and clearly visible trend that more institutional (i.e. not friends and family) investment is moving later stage for "normal" software businesses.

Actually the trend in the venture business is actually the opposite. The biggest change in the last few years has been the increase in pre-series A investments, both by "super-angels" (which are structurally mini VC funds) and existing VC firms.
I wasn't voting but to me they are orthogonal questions unless you frame it in specific way. Also to me that is not what the article was about. It was about defining immutable structures.

Julia is a client language and data must be local/in-memory to manipulate which SQL is generally has more going on and is usually being interacted with remotely. Julia might be faster than Sqlite3 but I sort of doubt it for an in-process manipulation where sql can do the work. Julia has an advantage that you can probably do more operations than what sql typically allows for.

I frequently hand code SQL to do complex aggregates in it so that the server can do the calculation fast and only send the result and I don't have to pull the whole data set to work on it. When Julia is client/server and I can write remote functions to aggregate data on the server and then return the result then this question can be asked again I think.
> Budhism (and lots of other things) was evolved and developed to be seen as a whole and in a few specific contexts.

Wha? Buddhism has a long history of evolving and mixing with local cultures, just like any religion. The zen stuff that these "koans" are either imitating or satirizing (depending on your view) comes from mixing Buddhism and Confucianism and Taoism and who knows what else.
You can't do that. Zerovm does not give you access to the system calls to create containers.
The new design is in preparation for the first "real" release of Flynn in a few weeks (with accompanying docs). Stay tuned, we'll email the mailing list and make a lot of noise when things are ready!
I love puzzles like the ones that Click and Clack showcase on Car Talk (NPR). The Sunday Puzzle (http://www.npr.org/series/4473090/sunday-puzzle) by Will Shortz is also another source of challenging word puzzles. Games Magazine and Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American are/were also fantastic reads for games and puzzles.

What other sources of word/math/logic puzzles are out there?
Interesting, does this mean if you were using an updated SHA256 hash (as will be required soon for all EV certs) that the exploit would not have occurred?