skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What makes this "really solid"?

If you mean, as an example of JS interactivity design, then yes. I agree. It's slick and it works as advertised.

If you mean, as an example of a safe extension to the most security-critical part of your application, then no. It's the opposite of solid. It's essentially publishing information that can be used to recover your password to the world.

I'm mystified as to how people could think this is a win.
Sorry, I knew that was a nonsensical example, I was just trying to make a clear example that they couldn't put any language into the contract that you couldn't legally fulfill.

In any case, I fear that you're very correct on both points. Even if it's not legally enforceable, it's going to cost the average consumer more than they're worth to fight it and have it nullified.
NASA wants proposals for space taxis
Yeah, which makes some sense. I think Clojure's strength is that it makes inroads with Java developers (as opposed to Common Lisp guys jumping over). If he can get the same excitement out of some .NET'ers it could double his user base.
Tampa myself, finishing my degree at USF.
ROS : Robotic Operating System
You don't write software for power plants in COBOL. COBOL is intedned for stuff like managing payrolls, not control engineering.
I think that Bruce has in the past said he sticks his passwords in his wallet on a piece of paper. Which works, I guess, since if you lose your wallet you're fairly hosed anyhow.
Search is a commodity (again)
Why a MS/Yahoo deal worked this time around, and what it might mean for Yahoo...
another vote for lambda-the-ultimate.org
gpgpu.org
insideHPC.com
I am constantly annoyed at all the homicides I have to step over every time I get off the homicide-laden trains in Chicago. I wish they'd do something about it. I see at least three at the Jackson stop every day. Sometimes there are even homicides in my back yard! It takes them forever to pick up, and if you just take them and put them by the garbage cans, the garbage trucks won't take them.

It's almost enough to make me want to move to Canada.
I haven't read Reddit in a while, so the headline just confused me. (AT&T is getting angry? Or it's afraid of angry class action suits?)
Yes it is a bit of a metaphysical view and by no means I am advocating a fatalistic view, where one should just sit and wait for things to happen. You can 'control' your immediate environment to an extend but not much more. To 'control your life' in the real sense it is impossible. Life is mostly a 'random walk' a bit like the stock market going in a certain direction but to find sense out of the noise is very hard. Are you here to-day on HN because your DNA makes you? Are you interested in CS because you had a teacher (parent etc) that influenced you (even subtly) at school? What would have happened if he was not there? So what is my suggestion? Just drive your boat, enjoy the trip and don't let it rust in port!

'Or humans have greater control of over the Earth resources than since our hunter-gatherers days; we know how to take sand to silicon'... this is for another post :), just watch the videos on the Taiwan typhoons! We can only control a very tiny part of that fractal, but maybe you right as people we may be able to give it a bit of colour! Just in case you wondering I call myself an Agnostic Atheist Christian Buddhist!
guardian, bbc news, HN, /. (but mostly lurking these days), google news, nu.nl
GM, eBay test online new-car sales
Does Oak Park count? =)
Another +1 for midtown actually a student at Georgia Tech
Sure, the potential is great. But none of the things you've mentioned really 'require' the AR component. They could all be done just as well with a good Google Maps interface. This is what I say when I mean it's a 'gimmic'. These are all great ideas, but they could be done just as well (except the last example), and for less money, using existing tech
Academic work on subjects like sorting tends to focus more on things like big-O runtimes and less on implementation details that lead to reducing the various constants that big-O simplifies out, or that arise from real-world data patterns rather than totally randomized or idealized data.
Awesome recommendations! I spoke with the people we're staying with, they also recommend Ahora.

Mambo also peaked my interest, we might make it there too.

Thanks!
exactly! don't know whether he is obnoxious or not but his writing is good. When he writes long articles (1 in 15) I read every word where as I just skim over most articles from techcrunch.
Yes, they could be, but not as well. Layar has some videos out on how this works, go have a look.

One of them is a fairly simple application where you hold the phone up against the skyline of the city and it shows you the outlines of properties for sale, you can then zoom in on them and the background information appears.

I can't see how a google maps version of that would give you the same interaction.
This company spent 3MM (06), then 6.8MM (07), then ~5MM (08) on SG&A (headcount). What chance does this shoot-the-moon business plan have in any vertical today?
It's nice to see a presence here. Of fellow HN-ers, of course, not the humidity and heat!
How are they startling unsafe?

If you watch someone type their password, you can get a visual cue that you retyped it correctly without submitting it to the server?

For me, this is like syntax highlighting. It is not necessary, but it's nice to have that colored visual cue so that your brain quickly knows that you got it right.
Also, if you're a .NET guy Seattle Alt.NET is a pretty good group of guys (and even some gals!).

We meet once a month.

http://groups.google.com/group/altnetseattle
http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors pretty much always shows the feed sponsorship as being sold out for at least a month.

I admittedly don't know very much about this sort of thing. Is being sold out for the next month good, or cutting it close? If it's the former, it would be safe to assume Gruber's selling at the rate card rate most of the time, no?
"Where'd ya go to High School?" to quote the St. Louis cliche.

(Parkway Central for me)
This is the least of your worries when you aren't submitting your password over SSL anyway.

Also, I doubt my cat really cares about guessing my password.
What Layar makes is neat, but finding rental places, I would argue, is actually better done through a mapping interface. I've seen their videos and it still looks like a toy interface. Nice to play with...but lacking an serious work potential
I think Bruce's point is that getting people to remember long, frequently changing pieces of weird text is hard. The risk of everyone picking 'password123' is much higher than everyone writing their passwords on a wallet. It is highly improbable that someone stealing your wallet knows what that piece of text on a paper is for
My nokia 8310 that had in 2001/2 supported it so maybe your phone does
So you know, Bruce Schneier is male.
No, I completely agree! I think that, for example, London has been more aggressive in removing the number of cars on the roads; even still, there are traffic jams galore.

There was a study about how building more than 3 lanes of highway did nothing to reduce congestion, because more people then just drove. (It's hilarious that you'd need as many tunnels into the CBD as West-East streets!)
This one, /r/programming, Slashdot, Coding Horror, Stackoverflow, xkcd, Ars Technica and a bunch of other ones through Google Reader
Very nice list, but most of the entries are over a year old. Many replies promised future results in what is now the past. Has any progress actually been made? Has YC funded any promising proposals?

If not, maybe the problems PG listed are "too hard" and perhaps we should build a larger list of simpler projects.
When you watch someone type their password into a PASSWORD input field, the only feedback you get is a dot on the screen.

When you watch someone type their password into one of these password-visualizing fields, you get a visualization of an hash of however many characters they've entered. If you have any ability to capture that hash, you can dictionary the password to a set of candidates.

If the person hesitates typing just long enough to get an interim visualization, you can probably narrow it down to a hand-guessable subset of passwords.

This isn't a reasonable security concession for the value of eliminating a server roundtrip to confirm a password, especially given the fact that less than 2% of your user base will ever use the visualization, but 100% of your user base is exposed to the liability.
Get to your network anywhere: VPN Over Skype (with code)
This advice is the "how to make the safest password possible" advice. In general, Schneier focuses not just on "maximum security", but also the security/utility trade-off.

Individual passwords for every site are probably overkill for many sites. For sites where no money is involved, you may as well share a password. If someone who knows my facebook password can access my slashdot account or my arstechnica account, that's not world-ending. Similarly, if someone has my Bank of America password, I'm just as screwed as if they knew my Amazon password or my PayPal password, so if they were the same, it wouldn't matter much (they not in my case).

I think the easiest way to generate a secure and memorable password is through transformations. For instance, if we reverse my name (Zachary), use symbols for the As and a 4 for the H, we get Yr@4c@z (no, this is not my password anywhere). Similarly, if you go one letter at a time from parent's names, you get something like JEolhinzaanbatehatnh (which could similarly take a letter->number or letter->symbol transformation). You get a secure password, and all you need to remember is the transformation algorithm.

- My parents' names are not Johnathan and Elizabeth, this is an example only.
This is a greasemonkey script that the user chooses to use himself.
Adaptive sorting has been studied in academia:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.45.8...
What? Does NYC subway really shut down because of the rain?
I'm guessing having configuration centralized is also easier to manage and a bit more secure.

As for performance, doesn't/couldn't Apache parse and cache a .htaccess file just once, and then only check the timestamp on subsequent requests?
Think these listings will be exposed to the eBay API?
I can't believe I never noticed the connection between web startups and gangsta rap until now.
He's sold a sponsorship for every week this year. (I went back and checked.)
I think what makes these bad-idea visualizers palatable to people is that they assume the applications that use them will only be used by a couple hundred people in their bedrooms or home offices. I think what makes them so repellent to me is the thought that one of those applications might become the next Twitter.

SSL vs. password visualization, which is worse? Depends on your threat model, I guess. It's academic to me. You should be using SSL also.
I posted the following comment to this article (currently awaiting moderation):

You stepped right onto one of my pet-peeves, so as calmly as I can, I'd like to explain why the whole Y2K bug turned out to be a non-event: because a lot of people -- myself included -- spent months poring over countless lines of, yes, COBOL (among others), and writing in year-windowing functions and the like.

In 1999, I was working for a large, affluent public school district in the East Bay in California. We had a Unisys mainframe -- and to the best of my knowledge, they're still running most of their stuff on it -- that was responsible for their accounting, their finance, their payroll, and all of their school operations.

If it only weighed in at a million lines of COBOL, I would be surprised.

And layered on top of that were, probably, tens of thousands of lines of WFL.

We spent months auditing (and patching) all of the functions in that systems.

When all was said and done, only a few unanticipated systems broke in the months following January 1, 2000.

However, had we not done all that work, I can assure you that nobody would have received a paycheck in January.

The people that always point to the end results of the Y2K bug as an example of unfounded hype bug me to no end. Have you even ever talked to someone that did Y2K work? I did, and it was not a picnic, and yes, a lot of things would have been broken if we hadn't done it. (Hell, there was even a critical patch for Sun DNS servers that had to be applied; I know this, because I applied it, and fought it with as it didn't work out quite right.)

As for 200 billion SLOC for COBOL ... yes, that seems a bit high, but I don't honestly think it's off by an order of magnitude. We were a little tiny system by lots of standards, and we were running easily a million lines of COBOL, and a huge chunk of it was custom code and in-house patches.
The author of the original content Schneier quoted is female. I assumed that's what he was going for.
Why do I not show up on the map? Is there something a HN user need to do to show up?
I looked around all of Los Angeles area, I don't show up.
Tim was right in 1998! But who reads 1998 articles? Cool URIs don't change http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI. Tim told us so!
Poll: What level general education did you complete ?
Please upvote only one item, it is assumed that if you have a PhD that you went to grade school at some point.
I don't think that there is anyway I would sign up for something that would allow people to cancel my upvotes. Even if I did, I'd open another browser to upvote and only us the extension enabled one to downvote, which would negate the point of the system.

I don't think that it would work.
Gruber's talk with Merlin Mann from this year's SXSW is a gem.

http://daringfireball.net/2009/03/obsession_times_voice

http://www.43folders.com/2009/03/25/blogs-turbocharged
Summary: we still can't reproduce the issue, but we're trying all kinds of things.

Nice to see how a large organization handles these kinds of reports, but this part really bothered me:

...one day unexpectedly Word started crashing for people. We hadn’t changed anything. It turned out a new version of a popular add-in released and the crash was happening in the add-in, but of course end-users only saw Word crashing.

Yeah, stupid users. They only saw Word crashing... but wait, Word was crashing. Sounds like there's a bug in the plugin system - just as applications shouldn't crash the OS, plugins shouldn't crash an application.

Hell, GMail warns me about slowdowns when I load it with Firebug is enabled - taking responsibility and acting on a brower add-on which is affecting a web app's user experience seems the wiser way of dealing with issues than blaming the user.

Summary of last part:

Please don't hate us, interwebs. You messed up Vista's PR glory, please don't mess up Windows 7. Did we mention it might be a hardware problem?
No Prob. I like Mambo a fair bit, we have went there the last 2 years for my girlfriends birthday. Their Mojitos are awesome and they server desperado(tequilla beer) which I like quite a bit.
What Is WAN Optimization, and How Can It Help You?
Review: Vibram Five Fingers Classic
No, it's a jQuery extension that has (among other things) been ported to Greasemonkey. What you do with your browser is your business; it's still a bad idea --- if you can do visualization with Greasemonkey, you can also do a password manager --- but if it's not in the actual web application, who cares?
But wasn't the requirement that a tweet fit into an SMS?
How relevant the SMS medium still is to Twitter is another question...
An easier way to do it would be the way the "undo send email" in gmail works: you don't actually take the action for a few seconds, during which time the user can change his mind.

My guess is that most accidental up/down votes are realized almost immediately, so this "grace period" would only need to be a few seconds.
It seems to be the sort of mindless numerology that social science types seems to think makes them "scientific"; business and management are to social science what engineering is to physics.
well - for one
1. You (the founder of a startup in India) would have a better understanding of the Indian technology consumer market and the application of your idea to the Indian scenario than a tech company which is originated elsewhere.
2. You are in the same time-zone as 1 billion other people. If you have ways or means of crowd-sourcing any tasks needed for your startup - where better to crowd-source than here (of course this depends on how effective are you at crowd-sourcing)
3. If you can spot an opportunity in a crisis - then this place offers you the ideal basecamp to look for those crisis/opportunities.

I could go on.

I guess at the end of the day it all depends on the problem you are looking to solve or the "big idea". For e.g. If your startup is about making it easier for suburban residents to interact with their neighbors or promote neighborhood activities - Mumbai would be the wrong place to start that startup. But if you are looking at implementing infrastructure technologies for dense urban setups than Napa Valley, CA wouldn't be ideal.
Perhaps in 1984 more students had a desire to be entrepreneurs, but it seems that in 2008 more students could actually be entrepreneurs.
Wikipedia Server Layout Diagrams
You're forgetting something. Some people really, really want Cuba to succeed.

That's why they're not proposing to set this up in, say Haiti.

Since they're essentially arguing for "we're going to show the savages how to do things", Cuba is a reasonable choice because it already has police state apparatus.
Ok, I studied speed reading a lot and you'll read 1000 words/minute by using this method, but how will this method affect your memory? I remember scientists suggesting to use multi sense while studying, so I wonder if this method is actually cutting one sense.

Some speed readers are also suggesting to read the stuff one more time with the time saved, but I don't see how this is smarter than going deep the first time.
I appreciate this is off-topic, but I've thought of doing the same thing for the same reason. May I ask where you found that was willing to do a high-quality one-off hard-bound print? I know of several storefronts that do either large runs, or only do paperback; just not one-off hard-bound editions.
OTOH, this is why Apple locks down its platforms.
The actual article is here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-readin...
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
Kids want to own music
Happily married to PHP, should I get a divorce?
I have been doing web development work with PHP now for over 5 years and for the last year or so using CodeIgniter (moving to Kohana on the next Project). I have a good background in Computer languages and have programmed average size developments on desktops using most of them. With all the hype with functional languages and developments such as Ruby on Rails, I have been thinking to try something different. I mostly do development work for web applications (mostly my own). One Project that is on the cards now involves a lot of text-analysis. I have been thinking Django and Python for this one. However, I ran some test code for this with PHP and other than the fact that PHP looks less sexy, I can do almost everything I want with PHP.

Can anyone make any suggestions?
What incoming college freshmen consider important parts of their future lives isn't a good metric of anything useful. The percentage of freshman who want to be doctors doesn't say much about the current or future number of med-school applications, but rather it says being a doctor is culturally idealized and popular at the moment.

I've noticed that there's a class of people who enter college looking to major in whatever they see as the most lucrative field. In years past, they've targeted pre-med, pre-law, pre-business-school, computer science in the 90s, and econ/banking in the 2000s. Now that we always hear about tech entrepreneurs being worth big bucks, that's suddenly the "major-of-the-month", soon to be displaced by something else when another field explodes into the public conscious or when we get Bubble 2.0.
Analytics on your link sharing.
One recommendation I thought was good is to use phrases as passwords. Like a quote from a book you like, or whatever.

No dictionary attacks are going to have the phrase you like. Also, phrases are easy to remember and easy to type usually. For simple sites like this, mypasswordatycombinator would probably work.
I had success compiling a small-scale mixed Scala and Java project. scalac takes both .java and .scala sources without much fuss, in my experience. I think this is an area that's improved a lot since the author wrote about it.
My guess is it's a talent acquisition.
Proponents of these shoes love to make the argument that we were made to run without shoes... but they never seem to mention that we weren't made to run on asphalt and pavement either.
I would argue that using 20+ years of data to extrapolate a mere 3-4 years in the future is perfectly acceptable. His coefficient of determination is quite high so I'm pretty comfortable using that model. Of course you have to be cautious when making predictions with any cyclical data, but I believe his methods are adequate.
(Not literal zillions?! :) )

Yes, I get the additional point-of-failure concern. Except, in practice, the points of failure seem to be squarely on the provider end, not the shortener in the middle.
Laois :)
I always thought that they ran on hamster power http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phodopus_sungorus_-_H...
Tr.im just wants to hold the public hostage with shortened URLs. Too bad nobody cares.
First year college students in 1984 might have thought that they'd like to own their own business, but I suspect that once senior year rolled around, they realized "oh crap, this is really hard" and gave up on the idea. The reality of "we need millions in investments and loans to build our widget and hire staff and stuff" hit, and they bailed.

By contrast, in today's world, the cost to entry is lower for most entrepreneurs in most fields, a higher proportion of people who would like to own businesses can actually follow through on giving it a shot. It's easier to prototype things, and it's easier to be a part-time entrepreneur, and the entry costs are measured in thousands, not millions.
Government is killing Silicon Valley innovation
Fly-by-night is to be avoided in all things. I would recommend picking a shortener that's been around more than a short while and seems healthy, certainly - just as I would recommend picking a hosting company that has the same qualities.
Wow, congrats to Paul Buchheit and the rest of the Friendfeed team!
Support for mixed Scala/Java projects improved a lot in Scala 2.7.2, which was released in late 2008, so there aren't problems mixing Scala/Java anymore.

Here's a description of what was added since this article was written:

"The compiler can now parse (but not translate) Java source files. This makes it possible to have mixed Java/Scala projects with recursive dependencies between them. In such a project, you can submit first all the Java and Scala sources to the Scala compiler. In a second step, the Java sources are compiled using the Scala generated .class files and the Scala sources are compiled again using the Java generated .class files."
OK, this is dumb. If you want to sell, why announce to the world (!) that you're failing? Either your product is dead or it's not. This sounds like a refusal out of spite, not logic.

The bit.ly offer was clean, and clearly in the public interest. Spitting on it now only makes the tr.im folks look small and petty.
The tech at FriendFeed is nothing to scoff at.
If you're going to issue unsubstantiated smears you should at least use the correct terminology: Astroturfing is the simulation of an entire grassroots movement, not merely the simulation of one guy's unsolicited opinion.
I continue to find it amazing that people don't routinely fuzz their protocol handlers. It's a test that you can literally write in 10 minutes.