skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it might be a slight exaggeration to just tax 2 persons. But it's based on the extremely skewed power-law distribution.

The richest 2 people in america have around 120 billion dollars between them. 100B are enough to directly give $5000 to 20M people under coupons and welfare today.

Even $1000 are more than the yearly income for billions of people in places with far less physical resources than the US (and close enough food prices). Heck, 200 million Pakistanis live with a national GPD of around 250 billion dollars for comparison ($1300 per person).

And the richest 400 share around 2 trillion between them. We haven't even touched the trillions they save from off-shore accounts, shady accounting etc. And that's for private citizens, one would also want to extent it to corporations.

Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year).

Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto.
> (almost certainly due to a third common causal factor, of course).

..or absolutely certainly associated so remotely that correlation is purely accidental and found only by carefully cherry picking data sources, ranges, functions to massage the data (log with the right base) and axis ranges. To sum up ... not meaningful.

You could find similar correlation between ocean temperatures and lottery numbers but you'd have to precisely adjust so many inputs that the correlation would be not so much found as constructed.
If a certificate uses SHA1, Apple (or any other vendor) can't help but use that for verification…
The java version instantiates a new SecureRandom instance every time it creates a new salt. While I don't think this hurts the randomness of the salt, it's an unnecessary performance hit.
Show HN: Ghost UI
Well this isn't that hard to answer for a lot of people:

"What the hell am I doing working on something that I just don't want to work on it the first place and what should I really be working on?"

Because what I don't want to work on pays, and what I do want to work on doesn't make money! If I were independently wealthy, I would have no trouble at all allocating my time to things I find productive and enjoyable to do, and give the results away for free. For example I have a backlog of several projects relating to improving OpenStreetMap data waiting for time to work on them, but I can't think of a way to get paid for doing them. I think the results would be valuable to many people, but it's hard for me personally to capture that value, since improving OSM data is kind of a public good that anyone can use freely (when your work enables a profit-making business based on OSM data, it's not like they pay royalties to all the people who enabled it).
France's welfare system is already close to ABI. You have to fight bureaucracy, you're not eligible unless you have no revenue, and it's barely enough to survive, you're supposed to be actively looking for work, but it's there.

We could start by simplifying the system, and replace that welfare system by an equivalent ABI (the salaries of currently working people will probably need some adjustments). It would be insufficient of course, but that would be a start.
I don't understand why someone would put resources to make fake likes/clicks.

What's the deal ? A concurrent who wants to discredit Facebook' Ad service ?
EC Council official website hacked
> I would love to hear why vanilla HN is better now.

Probably because it has more politics and less 'hacker news' these days.
I had a friend who tried [0] before, but switched back to a macbook after a few months.

[0]: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...
Its not flavor-of-the-month, its flavor-of-the-generation. That's a 4 or 5 year span- not a ship you want to miss. Django and Rails have brought significant Postgres adoption. If widespread OS adoption and support is a goal then it is wise to pay attention to the features and platforms that will drive adoption.
Thats not quite true. Apple has multiple subdomains, each for some part of their site. www.apple.com hosts most of the marketing stuff, but have a look at other pages, e.g.: http://store.apple.com/robots.txt
Sometimes you get sick, and you just don't want to eat (even Krispy Kremes), but you know that you have to eat to get better, so you force yourself to eat. This applies analogously with work: sometimes you are burnt out, sometimes you are bone tired, sometimes you fucked something up earlier and now have to do a messy triage, sometimes the most essential thing you could be doing with your expertise is boring scut work that no one else in your company can do... nevertheless, unless you are in a situation where you can just say "Fuck it, I'm going on holiday! See you losers when all of this is sorted out!", you may have to force yourself to work, both to get through the doldrums and also to keep being able to afford to eat.
The "person" who made the "error" in the core code could have made a similar "error" in the unit test.
I don't know that vanilla HN is better now. I abandoned it for two main reasons:

1. The Hacker News API I was using was very unreliable and would go down for days / weeks at a time, which made the whole pipeline unreliable.

2. I was consuming this as an RSS feed, but when Google Reader shut down I abandoned my RSS habit cold turkey, so now I pretty much only read sites that I visit directly, or things people link to on FB / Twitter.
I experienced the same, but majority of likes came from Mexico... Fake accounts too.
I found this post too specific i.e. it may or may not help - depends on your type of work.
I uninstalled WhatsApp 3 days back (deleted 3 somewhat largish groups of 15, 43 and ~34 - they all agreed to move to Viber). At least 10-15 of my friends have already done the same (uninstalling part). Almost everyone is one Viber anyway and some are now on Telegram too.

Now, I don't know how much such migrations will affect user-base (and I don't guess too much) but it can be noted that this is also the user-base that does online shopping, rates products and does a lot of things online, so this is certainly going to put a dent.
Ask HN: Why doesn't WhatsApp include a url in server message for upgrade
I have received a message from Whatsapp multiple times asking to upgrade to a newer version from google play. Any thoughts on why dont they simply include some url or other way to act on it? It feels as if they do not want users to upgrade, but on a second thought, if that was the case they wouldnt sent a message in the first place.
Every single medium-sized company is fleeing from Italy towards East Europe because of:

- taxes

- mafia

- masonry (the italian one, Grande Oriente d'Italia, is not as good as others)

- taxes

- less-than-robust legal system

- taxes

And, of course, also for the taxes.
The PHP function produces output compatible with the crypt() function, which has not only the salt and the hash, but also includes the type of algorithm and the bcrypt cost.

This means that you just whack the hash and the password the user entered into password_verify(...) and it will tell you if you have a match - you don't have to keep track of the four parameters.

The beauty of that when a stronger algorithm comes out or you want to increase the cost factor of your passwords, you just change the hashing code and you don't have to do anything fancy to not break all your old hashes.

You can also use the password_needs_rehash(...) function once you verify to see if you should rehash the password to bring it up to the new level.
They can't refuse to use it? It seems to me that SHA1 should be depracated.
There's a lot of work to do in parallelism, especially figuring out methods to automatically optimized problems for parallel architectures.
Oops, logo.
Yes, but it complains less with some upgrades (I've seen it happen)

So I think it's also South who's not as good in doing upgrades in MySQL as it is with PostgreSQL
Can Your Startup Flourish Despite Business Chaos?
>I think people started doing this when passwords were typically short, to increase the search space.

What annoys me most is when systems have a maximum password length which is something on the order of 10-12 characters. It's needlessly reducing the search space.
"log with the right base" doesn't make any difference. That's a linear mapping. For instance:

2log x = log x / log 2 = ln x / ln 2

(With 2log the logarithm in base 2, log and ln the logarithm in bases you pick, but you can think of 10 and e)

See, for example, http://www.purplemath.com/modules/logrules5.htm, or derive it from the axioms.
The node-pg driver by brianc is in good shape; I'm not sure why OP sees it as a major issue. Feel free to improve it, though.
> The money […] has to come from somewhere

Not necessarily. Money can be printed out of thin air. It is printed out of thin air right now, mostly by private banks (I know they're not technically printing money, but Fractional Reserve Banking and other shenanigans have the same practical effects).

Of course, once you're explicit about printing money, you need to be careful about inflation. But we shouldn't fool ourselves: we never ever lacked money. Money isn't scarce. What we may lack however are resources (both renewable and fossil), and labour.

But in this era of massive unemployment, it looks like labour isn't the bottleneck.
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”

Just for the record and off topic, this is known as the Hanlon's razor. It's usually attributed to Robert J. Hanlon, not Napoleon Bonaparte.
The GIN improvements were submitted as a set of separate patches and several of them have been merged into 9.4.
I was just going to comment that I'm using pomodoro as well. Glad I'm not alone. I wrote about the combination of strategies I'm trying to use to kick start a side project and pomodoro is one of them: http://refactoringfactory.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/the-side-...
> I think the concern was that we're just replacing illegal cartels with legal cartels.

Just like how legalised gambling just made it legal for the mobs to run casinos?

Except that's not what happened. Investors came in, bringing real managers, real security, and real regulation. They turned the seedy, Las Vegas strip into Disneyland. And those old mob run casinos, you'll find their demolition videos on youtube.
I use this sometimes - thank you!
1. That might be true. I haven't thought about that in any detail.

2. I don't know why either, because I wouldn't.
On OS X, only Mavericks is affected (10.8 is fine), which should reduce the number of software SKUs affected. Although their insistence on making it free & compatible with as many Macs as possible does mean around 46% of all Macs in use today are affected.
I don't tkink people care so much for storing json, rather than "talk" json to the database. A different interface with simple insert and update with json is typically what people are after. A sort of ORM that simplifies inserts and update (and retrieval per primary key even) where data is provided as json would be a much better tool to attract the newer generation of programmers.

And like some of the comments said, PLEASE auto-partitionning!
>It's formally called "Correlation does not imply causation" and it's fault of the person who is suggesting it.

Well, correlation sure DOES imply causation.

In the dictionary sense of "imply", as: "suggested but not directly expressed; implicit".

What it does not is necessitate causation, but it sure as hell does imply it.
Yeah confused. If you can't tell who signed a particular message, then what are signatures for? I thought they were for authentication, which means the message was not modified, and, I know who sent it.
Of course, a sufficiently high ABI would have welfare gotten rid of: no more free housing, schooling, nothing: just live with your ABI.

To really calculate the cost of ABI, you need to subtract the cost of welfare.
It's interesting to note that the Pomodoro breaks, at least if you use the 25 minute interval most commonly recommended, fit in well with this recommendation from the Cornell Human Factors and Ergonomics Research Group [1]:

Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable,
downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture,
then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute
time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture
break and move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is
insufficient. Movement is important to get blood circulation
through the muscles. And movement is FREE! Research shows that
you don’t need to do vigorous exercise (e.g. jumping jacks)
to get the benefits, just walking around is sufficient.

[1] http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html
Adding to what masklinn said, JSON is just another type with related functions and operators. It uses the already implemented extensible type system, and is no different from any other type including varchar and integer.
Walmart and Amazon are hyper-efficient organisations that are able to deliver extremely low-cost goods. Hence their popularity. If ultra low prices are what consumers want, then what's to stop someone attempting to sell marijuana that cheaply? Again, not really a vicious cartel's forte. A cartel's forte is violently excluding competitors to maintain high profit margins in a market hidden from normal legislative balances.

As long as all the growing takes place within the legalisation territory (i.e. nothing is sourced from illicit operations in foreign nations) then I see no reason why violent organisations would dominate legal trade of psychoactive substances.
I think the part concat with salt is required. But generating it FOR the user is orthogonal to the hashing function. But I will be surprise if the paper actually says it is required to generate one - because that shows the cleverness of the inventors, but also a potential weakness (implementation may be using weak random source, though counter-argument is that user supplied salt can be weak too).
If anyone is looking for a slow version – http://cssdeck.com/labs/hbuvchec
It sounds pretty hard to do using nothing but a soldering iron. The nice thing about the C2 is that you have all the I/O pins nicely exposed and there's a fairly helpful community built around them. It's not necessarily impressive in terms of documentation, but it's certainly better than something that's pretty much reverse-engineered.
Will YC consider an application from a team of two founders and the first employee holding stocks? The third guy is a programmer and a good friend.
Agreed. How about something like:

"Here is a financial transaction. Please make sure it is balanced and post it."

This is not trivial to do right now. Top-notch JSON support would make it a breeze.
For starters, if you really have to go to Facebook's office to be trained on how to spend money on their ad system, I'm not sure you are knowledgeable enough to be spending $100,000 a day on those ads. I doubt Facebook was going to teach you how to optimize your campaign in order to spend less money than you would.

As stories like these continue to pop up, it is important that FB take action to protect their brand.
How about simply refine the target audience for ads? for instance, in order for a user to be served ad; you must have a minimum number of friends, say 50, you must have a minimum number of say 3 pictures of yourself, you must have a reasonable level of activity on the site for over the last X period whether 3, 4 or 5 month period.

A combination of such measures in some ways will clearly weed out most of the fake account and honestly even if there is a genuine account who doesn't match any of these criteria, then it's obvious they aren't even engaged on the site, so why ruin the experience further for them with ads?

Ultimately, FB's objective is to please advertisers and the natural flow is that they will end up pleasing shareholders. But focusing of the hard accounting numbers in the short term at the expense of goodwill of the marketers paying your bills is simply suicide. Once a significant number of advertisers distrust the platform and stop spending on it, its' 1.2 billion users will mean nothing and that is where the shareholders will start dumping them for the next company.
The Parallax View
Microsoft asks pals to help kill UK gov's Open Document Format dream
Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so
Perhaps, but in most cases the person simply cannot follow your reasoning. That might not be your fault. The interviewer might not be as smart as you, or might not have a very theoretical background. I've never heard of the Boyer-Moore string algorithm, so when presented with it for the first time I might not understand it.
Um no its not NI pays for both benefits JSA (social security for non uk people) etc and the NHS.
Is there an editor/wrapper around SVGs that helps create animation? Or does it have to be done by hand?
As far as I can tell hstore is one of the most popular extensions to PostgreSQL, so people do indeed care about storing non-relational data in their database.
When I interviewed at the GOOG a year or two ago they asked me to rate myself on a 1-10 log scale for whichever skills I claimed to be proficient in. 9-10 was 'wrote the book' / 'invented the langauge' IIRC.
> Shouldn't you just be paying market value.

No, because human dignity. The market somehow works but it isn't fair. To take an extreme example, imagine how the Chinese people work their asses off for peanuts in order to get us iPhones.
I don't want to 'unsubscribe' telling spammers my email is valid for resell. I want to BLOCK spammers when I mark them as spammers, no matter if it is baby jesus reincarnated or if I personally subscribed to that list at the beginning unsuspecting an abusive spammer behind that mailing list.

I mark dozens of mails as spam everyday and I keep getting them back by the same sender.

Block means block, not unsubscribe.
ui.ghost.org seems to be dead
Just having a JSON type should fix this without the need for a JSON based protocol. Actually the current JSON support in 9.3 should be enough for this. Just call a stored procedure with the JSON object describing the transactions.
I think a good password would be something like, instead of writing the letter "a" in ascii, you use "a" in another encoding (I forgot what that called). I supposed no one ever thought of cracking such password yet.

The worst I have seen is from USCIS. See this image: http://i.imgur.com/hvyziAx.png
Always be on the lookout for emerging channels so you can test them out to see if they are a good fit for your business. Sitting on the sideline will cost you the first mover advantage. Even better if other businesses in your niche don't use some channels. You can dominate them then.
I'm keeping my Chase account on the theory that eventually it will be sold to somebody else anyway, probably Deutsche Bank because the rule seems to be that when my bank is bought, it's from somewhere even further away. Eventually it will be First Bank of Mars, then JP Morgan Proxima Centauri.

Seconding the highway-robbery international bank wire fees - in addition to charging far too much for wires, they also use a bad exchange rate to plunder even more from you, while not telling their employees that this is what's going on.
But I bet my code that was the core of one of BT's billing systems (and sold world wide) would not be perceived as very good quality.
Alfred Workflow: Use Cmd+Alt+N to create new emtpy file in Finder
From what I have been told by YC alum the assignment process for application review is randomized, meaning it is hypothetically possible that a direct competitor may read your application.

As a counter point, if you want to raise external funding, you probably should accept the fact you will likely have to share your idea without protection - as its unlikely any VC will sign an NDA, and you have no idea who they will push your pitch deck to in order to get a 2nd opinion.
(apologies for the harsh tone, I was tired and grumpy)
I think you're assuming that a platform can detect a buffer overflow. How exactly is an iPhone or iPad going to detect a buffer overflow?

I think we can all agree that owning the entire platform on a device is far worse than a MITM attack on a session. Even if it's all the sessions on that platform using TLS/SSL. executing code on the box means you can do many other things on that box, such as setting up a pivot point and keeping access to the platform as long as you want. If you can root the platform, then all bets are off.
"Maybe the jobs are gone forever" - Good analysis, economist. This article is full of bullshit 'maybes' and aggressive 'income inequality' overtones.

I don't know how this garbage gets onto HN.
I've been looking for a good book that teaches idiomatic C++11 programming from scratch. Something like Accelerated C++ or Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ but using C++11/14 only. Lots of the C++11 books I've found have assumed you know C++98 and say what the differences are. Anyone have any suggestions?
"The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to stack dishes in washer cabinets is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work."

Less sarcastically, automating that part of dirty dishes would not solve the whole problem of dirty dishes, would directly cost a lot and would make life more boring (standardized dishes!).
At the last French presidential elections, one candidate proposed a similar measure at a national level:

First, no one shall earn more than 20 times the median revenue. Everything above it is taxed 100%.

Second, no salary shall be more than 20 times the revenue of the lowest paid people in the same company.

Of course, he didn't get elected.
>System programming languages with GC were already used at various Xerox PARC systems.

With what performance? Handling modern day like multimedia/number-crunching/10M connections etc high workloads?
Show HN: Brackets Ninja – Create brackets for tournaments and championships
A new tool I created allows you to create Brackets for managing leagues, tournaments, and championships online!<p>The tool is extremely recommended for office sports.. :)<p>What do you think?
Further to 1) if the NSA fulfilled its mission and actually helped secure the country against enemies, they would have immediately told Apple about the security hole. Hence we're down to 2) and a modified 3) Apple, complicit with the NSA, added or kept it.
I have question. Is salting solution like hash_function(salt_hardcoded_in_app + password_string + user_unique_salt) bad? Does adding hardcoded salt reduces security of app? Why? Thanks for any info on that.
Pommodoro Technique is so effective that instead of avoiding starting work I began to avoid starting pomodoro timer.
nice article.
password hashing - doing it right && cracking it right

http://www.linuxx.eu/2014/01/how-to-hash-and-crack-unix-pass...
Umm, no NI is not hypothecated.

Welfare and healthcare are run by different govt departments.
That makes it slightly harder. Still, Apple will sign anything that is successfully submitted to the App Store for approval, right? So you just need to slip a single trojan past their approval process. Normally, the transport layer provides an important second level of defense: a victim would have to consciously choose to install YOUR program in order to get hacked. That doesn't work anymore when the security of the transport layer is compromised. Now anything that you install from the App Store could be surreptitiously compromised. Better hope that Apple's signature revocation infrastructure is sound.