skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>>>The tech scenes pitchfork mobs are wildly inconsistent.

Just because the mob is all pitchfork'ed and ready doesn't mean it isn't its own victim to the trap of considering the world black and white.

There really are no absolutes. We're all using machines built for us by slaves. But at least we are communicating on how this enslavement can end. Would you end the show just because you think the last 15 minutes are 'a forgone conclusion'? Hang in here for this argument, and you may discover that the world is not black and white.

Ms. Rice is hated because of the things she allowed to occur as a part of her lifestyle. She is a cog in what many consider to be a highly destructive, death machine.

High-moral consistency is one thing; on the other end of this conversation is a father, laying dying in the ditch, watching the bits of their kids fade into the dirt. Condaleeze Rice is responsible for a fuck of a lot of that.
Heartbreaker
> NSS has more institutional constraints; random people in Germany can't, as a general rule, add support for new TLS extensions to it.

Why not? NSS is handled by Mozilla. Mozilla prides itself on being open-source. People can submit patches to NSS by filing in Bugzilla.

> The most important code in both NSS and OpenSSL is the SSL state machine. The code for that state machine is incontrovertibly clearer and better expressed in NSS.

I agree with this to some extent (although I don't think it's quite as much better as you suggest), and cleanups in that code are needed. Other parts of NSS can certainly rival OpenSSL on the "dear god" scale however. I'll take the low-level parts of OpenSSL over NSS any day.

> NSS has had better battle-testing as a clientside browser TLS library than OpenSSL, which, apart from Android Chrome, isn't a big factor in TLS clientsides.

This is true. We will have to rack our brains and our bug database for some of the unwritten rules of TLS to port over to OpenSSL. I'm not too worried about this in the long term however.

Ultimately the proof will be in the pudding. Ask again in 12 months :)
Uncertainty versus certainty in the mammography wars
Just curious, what was the idea behind the food focused food app? (I also launched a failed food focused web app).
You are talking about the "book of business" problem.

I agree but I think there might be other legal (or see "know the customer yourself" below) ways to protect your clients.

So while you can't prevent someone from working for a competitor I believe there is a reasonable way to protect the customer list and/or specifically soliciting an existing customer. [1]

Nothing can prevent a client who knows the new business from approaching the salesman of course. But if the salesman is prevented from contacting them it is a bit of friction.

Separately, a way that you can protect against this is also to build some loyalty (as the business owner) with the client. Make contact yourself and let them know you value their business. Not fail safe but will definitely help. In other words multiple contacts, not just one contact.

[1] I've seen this even with hair salons for that matter. You will see ads which say "Joan is now at XYZ Salon" because Joan isn't allowed to go after her clients. But she can advertise that she has a new job. But not directly (by direct mail to a list of only her clients but she could spray direct mail though or advertise in the local paper because it's not targeted).
Obviously this isn't fast but you can't have both.

Merge sort is still pretty fast. It isn't the fastest. But safe > fast when it comes to reliability and security.
I'd love to hear what the HN crowd think about my comments on FB Ads after so many stories trending bashing Fb Ads :)
Is the OpenSSL protocol sufficiently pinned down that any difference between behavior of NSS and OpenSSL is a bug in one or the other?
Coincidence or not, this is my first comment ever with a negative voting score. I guess downvoting is blackballing on a small scale: silence all those who have dissenting views.

I always upvote well written comments, regardless of my personal agreement with the view. I loathe this face of Hacker News I'm seeing today.

I'll upvote each and every 0 or -1 comment that is well written (as in: not a one liner, not a joke, presenting an opinion). It's my small effort towards the Hacker News I like, where quality of writing is valued instead of herd mentality.
Since you can stop yourself stating these obvious facts at work, can you stop doing it here, too, please?
I used Stylus on a project a few months ago, this would have been handy to convert our existing sass.
Yes, yes there is:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agorism

Unfortunately, back in 2007, I wrote off any libertarians as wacky, selfish geeks with very little political sophistication.

Since then, I've come to meet some of the least selfish and most politically sophisticated individuals I've ever met, who are also libertarians. And none of them are particularly fond of Ayn Rand (to name another one of my 2007 biases).
Don't worry, the smart people who are self-consistent are still upset.

One battle at a time.
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue 20
Pretty straightforward — Theo De Raadt is quite a well-known "controversial" character, and he's pretty blunt with it, too. Remember, he's the guy who was punted from NetBSD for "[a] long history of rudeness towards and abuse of users and developers," and the guy who Linus Torvards described as "difficult."

He's also an astoundingly capable, effective and security-focused developer. This means that there's probably a hole in the FreeBSD distribution of OpenSSH that he's aware of any has not disclosed. Dickish behaviour, but that's his MO, so there's little to be surprised about.
If a sales person is keeping around 50% of your business, you should provide incentive for them to stay- right?
It depends how you define "lie."

The administration created its own shadow intelligence operation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans) that, effectively, ignored CIA National Intelligence Estimates and cherry-picked unfiltered/unanalyzed intelligence to made the case for war.

This was a mission in need of justification. The Downing Street Memo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo) pretty much makes this not open to debate.

"Lie"? Well, there are different kinds of lying.
> almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation

Stopped reading since there, since it sounds like a usual blind rant and not anything to do with reality or reason. The moment conflict in Israel kicks in, many otherwise reasonable people lose common sense (it can go in either direction about the sides of the conflict IMHO). Not sure why it's so really.

Otherwise valid criticism is discredited by such cliche phrases which don't suit someone like Knuth.
Especially for projects that use some form of "git submodule" and their modules appear top-level in the github page (or other sites for that matter)
As other folks have mentioned, the issue is that many people looking to hire just look at your GitHub page and your repo list.
Why you need both a technical and a career mentor
Though I have never, and will never sign one of these agreements, I cannot agree with your statement that they "reduce[] overall market efficiency". First off, such a grand claim merits some citation of empirical or theoretical evidence. Secondly, there are a variety of ways that these agreements (which I do not support) may increase productivity, such as by increasing the employer's trust in the employee, allowing the latter to access confidential documents, and increasing the average period of employment, thereby giving the employee more time to accrue experience and improve productivity in a specific field and/or application.
Ask HN: Any guides for launching a product signup page?
One of my side projects has generated some interest, and I want to build a landing page/site to start off my sales pipeline. Initially I'm thinking just an email signup, then I can send out more information and work with customers individually to bring them onboard. Its targeted towards enterprise, so its actually feasible to have more of a manual onboarding process.

My question is this: what resources do you use when creating such a landing page? And what crucial content do I need to put on it (clear descriptive text and the email signup being obvious)? Tutorials, example sites, and the like are all good.

We see a lot of great launches here on HN and I've picked up some tips from them, but haven't seen as much in terms of references about this.
In my experience, this is because people who agree with whatever the status-quo currently is erroneously believe their views to be "apolitical" while everything else is "political." Having views or opinions that are "political" is branded as bad by those in power since it threatens their control.

Judge ideas and actions based on their merit rather than whether they line up with current trends.
yeah, I'd be grumpy too if everyone uses your SSH implementation and can't even be arse'd to buy a friggin' CD or a t-shirt...then pooh-pooh the entire OpenBSD project, probably over that very SSH implementation.

don't let reality hurt your tender sensibilities ;)
MCServer (the open source Minecraft server) reaches the 5000 commit milestone
I am glad to see an American stating the following:

>If we peremptorily strike country X, why shouldn't country X have a right to do the same to us, and to our children and grandchildren in future years?
Luckily we elected the polar opposite to Bush, who turned out to do things pretty much the same as Bush. Nothing that you are saying started or ended with Bush. We did similar things for a hundred years before Bush, and we are doing worse things now with Obama. The hatred of Bush and his administration is just bizarre. The Patriot act was voted for by Congress and continually extended by both R's and D's.
I don't want to deny consumers from the ability to choose. This concept theoretically makes business entities weaker and employees stronger. In practice I presume that this concept would force business owners to provide less information to employees if such information could be used against them in the future. So is the employee actually stronger?
Bush actually campaigned on a "humble foreign policy" in the 2000 election. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_presidential_cam...
BitTorrent Sync Hacks: Setting Up Sync For Mac, a Web Server and NAS
I personally like MarkdownPad (http://markdownpad.com/, windows only),
but for some non-basic features (GitHub Flavored Markdown, PDF export) you have to buy it for $15.
D-Wave Aims to Bring Quantum Computing to the Cloud
That's not "nuance" it's "pedantry". You're not "broadening" the discussion by pointing out the obvious.
Higher initial salaries perhaps, but lower annual increases, since employees don't have as many jobs to switch to so there is less incentive for raises.
Hacker news is not vulnerable - it uses CloudFlare which patched before the public disclosure.
> Maybe a fork of NSS would be a better plan.

Is forking it actually needed? I was under the impression that Mozilla has many of the same complaints about the current state of NSS as the Chrome team and merely don't want to dedicate the resources to cleaning it up.
(With apologies to Zed Shaw, I am just using him as a high profile example)

Zed Shaw can be an asshole. But that guy can sure sling code, and I'll eat up anything he programs. Hire him as CEO of a large public company? Now we have a problem...

Brendan Eich actively opposes gay marriage. But he programs at Netscape and invents Javascript. Love the guys work. Hire him as CEO? Now we have a problem...

Hopefully this shows that the responsibilities at different levels within a business have differing impacts on society. So what if Zed Shaw is an asshole as a software developer? At that level he lacks the political clout to negatively impact society on such a large scale. We can then see that his short temper and sometimes vicious (and often hilarious) barbs are confined in reach. But what if he was President of the United States, sat in a room with Putin, discussing the Ukrane situation? Diplomacy may suffer.

This is why I had a problem with Eich as CEO of Mozilla. His backwards political views would have the political clout and mechanisms to negatively impact society.

As for Rice being appointed to Dropbox? I simply do not trust someone who has been shown to lie for political ends, to the point of invasion of a soverign nation and promote, participate in and endorse war crimes. I require COMPLETE TRUST in any data storage provider I use and as such deleted my dropbox account.
Don't you see the irony here?

Sounds like another example of toxik behaviour to me. I've been working in C++ for 20 years, yet ther are certainly advanced techniques that I could not roll off without errors on a whiteboard and corner cases you catch me on during an interview. What should I put down in my CV? 'vague knowledge of C++?'

I fail to see how 'taking the gloves off' and 'washing their mouth' is substancially different from 'feigning surprised.' It's the same contempt.
OK, but imagine this situation: I have affixed a monitor with a webcam to a robot that represents "me" in an office. It is able to sit at a desk, attend meetings, etc. I work from home in some place with a lower cost of living and use the robot proxy for interaction with my peers. Should I be paid more or less than other people working in that same office, producing the same output?
Chances are FTL communication is not possible.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=612

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_communication

The book, "Why E=mc^2" is an exceptional read. If I recall correctly, it explains why light-speed is a universal limit:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Does-mc2-Brian-Cox/dp/0306819112
Bittorrent Sync is an amazing product, I'd recommend switching even if you don't have political issues with dropbox. I use it to keep work files in sync between 3 different computers as well as to backup 100s of GBs of pictures, something that would cost a non-trivial amount to do with cloud providers.
Google has already written and released a complete crypto stack for Go. Where you restricting your comments to C/C++ implementations?
Normally you would expect marketers to know that when you are dealing with a low amount of traffic (probably from a low spend), one or two errant clicks or a bot can totally throw off your numbers. This article does a great job of showing proving that you need larger datasets to get a better understanding of what's going on. It does a great job of showing the discrepancy in numbers from tracking platforms, but that's probably just because I'm sensitive to that right now, since I've been dealing with it myself fora while.
I dropped Mou in favour of LightPaper http://clockworkengine.com/lightpaper-mac which has more features (tabs, edit or preview panels hiding), better themes and customisation imho.
Which incidentally is consistent with the fact that the Nexus 4 was never a big seller outside the tech community.
Should you be using a more expressive voting system?
Though with the "weakest link" dynamics, I'm not sure "damages are everywhere" isn't a feature. If your library primitives are supposed to be designed such that they can only be used safely, and if there is a flaw in your primitives, the fact that everything uses those same primitives means that there's more testing of that same code in different situations, and so "damages are everywhere" means that errors are more likely to show up in some test. That is on top, of course, of DRY naturally shrinking the code that needs the most carefully audited.
I think that you are right when it comes to something like a negotiation between a business and a labor union. Both sides simply view it as an adversarial process, much like how lawyers represent their clients and presume the system will work it out from there as long as they are relatively honest.

However, while it may often require some credulousness, I think a significant majority of people sincerely believe that their political positions make the world a better a place rather than just their own lot in life.

There are honest discussions that can be had about most policy decisions. For instance, it might be difficult to sell your software business, if you can't legally promise not to immediately launch a competing product. And yet, most of the serious policy mistakes of the past few decades have been made in the wake of debates involving two sets of competing soundbites—a problem that could be improved by better economic education starting at a younger age if I'm right that people are generally motivated to improve the world.
The day I can write C# on both the server and client, instead of js with Node.js, I'll be soooo happy.
Fix OpenSSL, and everyone that currently uses OpenSSL benefits. Create a new library that's clearly better than OpenSSL, and ten years later there will still be important things that still haven't switched.
Note though that undecidability is not really an issue in practice. You can always just refuse to run any function compile time that has not yet passed termination check. In fact Idris does exactly this. This already puts Idris ahead of C++ in terms of compilation termination, and it's not even like people are frequently disgruntled about diverging C++ templates.
You can also cache some content on a page, even for logged-in users, and add in the dynamic parts using ESI. For example an ecommerce site could have a category page cached, and have one section at the top that says "Hello, John Doe" generated dynamically and added in using ESI.

https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ESIfeatures
Does this logic apply to the workers who maintain the physical infrastructure for the CIA? The Coke guys who refill soda machines? The internet providers?

Where do you draw the line? A government agency leverages services to further it's agenda- should those businesses take a moral position?
While I understand why folks voted this down, but it made me laugh. :) I never thought about the NSFW filter, but I believe domains that fit my full name were taken when I registered the domain.

When I was a little kid, my last name was a problem because of the times I grew up in, but nowadays it only leads to hilarity. Plus it's short and easy to spell. ;)
"If those 50 clients would be better served getting a different product from a different vendor, then why would you want to stop that?"

Because you need to earn a living for one thing. And you won't keep your job for long as another reason (see strategic cases below because there are exceptions of course).

Anyway along those lines would you suggest that a salesman for jet engines for Boeing not take an order and simply tell the client that a Rolls Royce engine is a better fit for the application? (And yes I know that there are strategic cases where it can build loyalty by doing this and/or if the stakes aren't to large you can try to be helpful.).

So in other words the salesman's job is to, at the expense of the survival of his own company, to simply help the client (on his employer's dime) make the best decision and as a result he will still be able to earn a living because everything will just work out? And of course his competitors are doing the same thing, right?
No, Snowden's files predate the public knowledge of the vulnerability.

As far as I know, we presently have no way of determining whether or not the NSA had knowledge of the bug.

From the CVE[1], we see that OpenSSL versions from the very start in 2012[2] were vulnerable.

1 https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2014-01...

2 http://www.openssl.org/source/
(Jan 3 14:41:35 2012 openssl-1.0.1-beta1.tar.gz)
What economic theory would suggest this? This non-compete appears to be an option, and would be priced as such.[1]
I would guess that purchasing any additional assurance from an employee would cost the employer(s) more, perhaps in the form of salary, severance, or a signing bonus.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_of_options
Boilerplate/automated responses are rarely helpful and often the single most frustrating thing in the technical support/customer support world. I would truly wish on technical forums (like Mint, and Microsoft, etc.) that they would be done away with.

The complete lack of emotionality and disconnect it creates with your user base is damning to your company. The only automated response I want to hear is "Your ticket was forwarded to XYZ, if there is no response within 24 hours please contact thisperson@ourcompany.com".

I really feel that customer/technical support is a BIG part of keeping customers/getting repeat customers/selling via word of mouth. And its so often tossed to the way side.
Αmway XS Power Drink – Home and Beauty : Home and Beauty
Relevant: http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2014/04/01/north-korean-r...
Outsourcing usually means hiring cheap, low-quality third-party labor and firing/not hiring skilled, trained full-time employees. Whether this is from another country or not is unrelated.

The situation described in the article has nothing to do with outsourcing, but building a remote team, both foreign and domestic.

Using the term "outsourcing" does a disservice to those employees. Since the Midwest was mentioned specifically, I had a similar reaction to the one you had for my comment.
With my tinfoil hat securely fastened, who wants to hazard a guess that this is just a 'distraction' to the Heartbleed news that the NSA could've exploited for their own nefarious means?
If anyone is interested, this is an excellent book about the lives of people inside North Korea, told through the eyes of several defectors: http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0...
Except that she was supposed to represent our values.

If there's any irony, it's that she did more harm to American values than did Sadaam.
> Snowden's files predate the existence of this vulnerability.

The vulnerability is over two years old. I second scott_karana in thinking that you're wrong.
Bob's number any number you can think of plus one.
>> NSS has more institutional constraints; random people in Germany can't, as a general rule, add support for new TLS extensions to it.

> Why not? NSS is handled by Mozilla. Mozilla prides itself on being open-source. People can submit patches to NSS by filing in Bugzilla.

Maybe he meant Mozilla as an organization is much better equipped to handle patching of NSS better than the OpenSSL team. I have seen Firefox bug reports number of times and there seems to be a proper process in place to review patches before accepting. I am not aware of anything that good on the OpenSSL side.
While the content is great, this was one of the worst experiences I've ever had trying to navigate and read content. I love the concept, but the UX and the answers to "what do I click on, where do I look" were horribly confusing for this first-time user.
> "This is about value, not cost. How much is your time worth? TurboTax and other DIY software will take you hours (our customers tell us 1-3 hours). Our intake process is averaging under 15 minutes. The CPA or EA then goes offline to prepare your return and will send it to you later that day. Since they're experts they know what questions to ask so back-and-forth is not common, beyond the first intake appointment."

That paragraph alone is 10x better than the video you have taking up space on the homepage. It's much more compelling for those with simple tax situations.

It doesn't work so much for me--someone who's self-employed and has a life event every year or two--because I can zip through TurboTax in about 2 hours without having to talk to anyone. Their free phone support, guarantee, lower rate, and convenience more than make up for the extra 1.5 hours I spend on it.

> "Does the ability to videoconference provide value to you? Or would you rather just communicate via chat or phone?"

To me personally, video chat would not add any value, and would even make me less comfortable.