skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those curious, This American Life did a whole podcast on the end-of-month car sales thing. It was quite fascinating and really does exist.

One of the more interesting points in the entire thing came in the first minute where they point out that things like the end-of-month sales impact the entire US economy because it has to do with auto sales, and GM and steel working and etc follow up the chain. Weird to think of it like that.
Looks really awesome. Will definitely have to look around and recommend to others.

Is the ambassador model similar to the "jewelry parties" or Pampered Chef? Are you a non profit?

My wife just started working with Noonday Collection [1] which seems somewhat similar but for women's jewelry.

[1] http://www.noondaycollection.com/
That's a rather bleak outlook, but I don't blame you. Obviously you can't name which specific company you work in, but may I ask which sector in finance you do?
Herein lies why I can't wait for driverless cars. Cars are supposed to stop while a pedestrian is in an intersection, no matter if the pedestrian has already passed the car and is a 'safe distance away'. The reason is by stopping you are signalling to other drivers that there may be a pedestrian in the intersection. Just in case the other drivers don't see the pedestrian for some reason.

I agree with your point however, that competition is important on performance elements like the quality of the drive.
There are many ways to change the content and/or structure of an app. One app I worked on was essentially a fancy JSON parser- you could specify what view controllers to put where and what to put (some UIKit objects) in their views. Another app had a fixed structure but dynamic content (again, specified by a JSON file) that was downloaded regularly to keep the content up to date.
I don't know if "10 years" falls in your definition of "next few years".

For a viable rogue CA attack, you need a chosen-prefix attack. Current best research (https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/EC13-S.pdf) shows it should take 2^77.1 SHA-1 compression calls to do a chosen-prefix attack. Say this is improved to 2^65 within the next 10 years. Right now a good GPU (AMD R9 290) can do 3 billion SHA-1 compression calls per second. Say Moore's Law continues for the next 10 years and that 10 years from now a GPU can do 20 billion SHA-1 per second. So 10 year from now, 100 high-end GPUs should be able to produce a rogue CA with colliding SHA-1 signature in 7 month of compute time.

Change one little assumption and assume the best attack ends up being 2^60 instead of 2^65. In this case, a viable attack could certainly be carried out in the next 3-4 years.

You can't cross your fingers and hopes such an attack will not be discovered. The time to abandon SHA-1 is now.
> Could I write an automated tool that takes my clipboard, uploads it somewhere, and replaces the clipboard with an image URL? Probably. Or I could use a chat platform that supports images.

Which is exactly that automated tool, but already written by someone else and embedded directly into your UI. It's not that those images magically go over the wire straight from your clipboard without being hosted somewhere (especially that, AFAIR, Hipchat is XMPP-friendly).

I do understand why Hipchat, et al. are getting more and more popular - I was under contract for few weeks at a place that used Hipchat as a company-wide communication tool and I admit it was super-convenient (as long as your machine had enough free RAM to run it, which wasn't always true; for a chat client, this thing is heavy). But the thing is, IRC could easily be on par with Hipchat-like solutions if someone wrote proper UI extensions to popular clients.

Of course until someone actually goes and does that, we'll be stuck with Hipchats.
The point is that currently producing a single collision may cost a couple million dollars of brute force for now. So we should expect it to be used (there are attacks where that much money is invested, either a very valuable target or very many low-value targets), but we should expect to see one only after a highly targeted attack is detected and analyized - in the case of Flame, those steps took a few years.

Some government agency MITM'ing major social sites or email providers would be rather possible at that cost.
I would imagine Facebook had been planning this switch for more than a month...
The best way to do this is with your users using a Chrome extension to feed the data back to you. User lands on a page? Send the data back to your scrapper processing API.
I've been playing with it too:
http://imgur.com/VAHTfg9

It took a little bit to generate this one.
Apple iPhone’s Mobile Payments Expected to Include CVS and Walgreens
In addition to other points, you can consider the arbitrary inflation of fiat as a sort of fee.

When you get fiat from anyone, you can not assume the availability of the same currency tomorrow. The state controlling it can arbitrarily create more whenever they please. That is the dominant source of inflation in fiat currencies, whereas in btc and other cryptocurrencies the velocity of funds becomes the influencer in that same regard. That happens in fiat too, but is overwhelmed by the prevalence of unpredictable money printing.

The point is that with a sufficiently entrenched cryptocurrency, that volatility due to money entering or leaving the market (ie, buy some btc as an investment and sit on it) is drastically reduced (and the volatile availability of funds combined with the speculation gives bitcoin its unpredictable exchange rates) you eliminate the most prevalent forms of unpredictability from your money - since with crytocurrencies, the algorithm makes the monetary base very predictable, and if you had a currency at a "good" inflation rate generating a lot of monetary velocity the frequency of funds leaving the system for an extended time (besides lost wallets) would be even more negligible.

That inherent overhead of unpredictability in fiat is a natural "fee" that everyone has to subconsciously consider what evaluating transactions using such currencies.
A flag memorial as colored point cloud
Echoing jacquesm and especially wpietri, the last time I can remember signing an NDA for an interview, the company actually had a MVP and customers, the MVP was being crushed by the load (the company provided services and used the MVP internally to produce those, so it wasn't a super crisis yet). I was hired to help improve the MVP, and do all the things a 2nd technical type might do.

The company before that, though, had a great idea, but their policy of total secrecy before launch, and fear of getting crushed by immediate load, delayed their launch past a point where they could survive. Although in that case they were creative people.
I had been in technology consulting and software development for about 6 years when I decided to potentially peruse my MBA. My undergraduate degree was in engineering and I had a business minor, but I was curious to see if an MBA would be worthwhile, so I listed my options:
-	No MBA
-	Full time MBA
-	Part time MBA (many schools offer various flavors of this)

I also considered several factors:
-	Is an MBA still a desirable degree? (the answer may vary depending on industry, location, position, etc.)
-	Do I need to go to a top X school to receive a decent ROI?
-	What are the costs (tangible, intangible, opportunity, etc.) with each option above? This is a complex question with several sub-components. For example: a full time MBA would mean two years less career progression on top of salary loss.

There are many variables that can be difficult to estimate:
-	Actual cost of an MBA
-	Opportunity cost of lost salary (full time MBA)
-	Opportunity cost of lost salary increase (no MBA), if any
-	Networking value of attending certain schools
-	Etc. ad nausea

Of course, many of these are recurring. Which rate do you use to estimate current value of the time series? Student loan rates if you need financing? Discount rate used to quantify risk of any of the options? More uncertainties…

I created a spreadsheet to estimate my various models and came up with the following solution for my particular use case (YMMV!):

I enrolled in a professional MBA program from a top 25 public school (part time, one weekend per month, 16 months, with online work to supplement) of which my employer would cover some of my costs (no stipulations on repayment).
Net result? I felt that I learned a lot and that the program was worthwhile for me. The most important piece of knowledge: how to best find out what I do not know about a given situation. I will never be a corporate accountant, but I now know what I do not know about corporate accounting (A LOT!). I know now that I do not know a lot about valuating pre-revenue startups, etc.

Do I feel that every person in my cohort received the same amount of value from the program? No. You get out what you put in.

Do I think an MBA is right for you (or anyone)? That depends on your situation. A driven person can learn most, if not all, of the material on their own. They can network on their own. They may not derive any benefit from an MBA.
At the end of the day, I estimated all of the constraints and variables to the best of my ability and went for the option that I felt was the most “correct” for me, at that time.

So basically, I just rambled on for a TLDR answer of: it depends.
It puts the pressure back on Someone.

Your friend has to do a bunch of stuff in 10 days to satisfy Someone. There's opportunity cost associated with that, and there's no guarantee of money yet.

Just saying no relieves a lot of that pressure. Someone has to decide if they're really interested. If you get No right away, you've saved yourself 10 days of pointless work. If they accept the new timeline, they're probably more interested than you realized.

It's kind of like poker. If you're not sure enough to make a tough decision, you can always make somebody else make a tough decision instead.

edit

Assuming no information about Someone, they're level of interest X might be .01, or .99 - they have at least a little interest, because they're meeting you.

Making a demand lets you calibrate your understanding of X a little bit. Outright rejection indicates X was really low to begin with.

Maybe they have some regulatory constraint, and the date is a huge hassle to change. Well, X is less than that cost of change. In that case, they'd tell you.

In the OK, state, you you're likely better than .01, but you don't get a ton of information about how much better. If they explain why the timeline is they way it is, it's Y effort to change those dates, you can adjust X to the new level proportional to how much extra work you've made them do by missing the deadline. - They're at least that interested.
agreed. I funded Watsi on a recurring basis just because of the awesomeness of the story and it's impact.
> If you had several candidates of equal ability, would you still use an exploding offer?

1) yes
2) I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I had multiple candidates without any preference.
Additionally... how are we supposed to figure out when things fall out of copyright if nobody puts dates on anything? You might not think your blog post will be worth anything to anyone by then, but otoh, we're absolutely terrible at predicting what'll be valuable even 5 years down the line.
Auction for domain name hook.io
FWIW, even Java allows something similar to 2, i.e. with Jackson

public class Point {
public String x, y;
}
Point v = new ObjectMapper().readValue(io, Point.class);

It also works ok with Lists and Maps.
The most likely novel vulnerabilities with these will be in the way they network with one another and municipalities. Also, doubtless people will try to carjack them or steal the hubcaps and stuff.
It's a real issue, I've been asked to sign NDAs before interviewing for jobs.
The Question of Coverage for Ride Service Drivers
Thanks rpiip!
Function hit counts in Firefox
In its current implementation the plugin finder just redirects to the gnash source at ftp.gnu.org (which is signed) or the mozplugger website.

This will be updated to provide a more useful response to the user, in particular it will try to provide a way to install the appropriate package from the repos of the distro the browser is running on.

The note about changing to http comes from the fact that the finder service doesn't work through https://gnuzilla.gnu.org/ but http://gnuzilla.gnu.org/plugins/PluginFinderService.php We would work on this too.
> Your credit card is where your wealth is stored.

Your credit card is just a means of payment (a key). Your wealth is stored at your bank.

All these merchants may have your bank keys, but they can't use it to charge you illegally because they will incur costs (a chargeback fee and then some). It a great system in which both the consumer and the merchant are incentivized to behave correctly...
This is sensible and good for the entrepreneur. If its good for the entrepreneur, its good for the prospective accelerator, its good for the prospective investors and so on and so forth. The virtuous cycle is for real. The issue is the not-so-famous accelerators bear the brunt because almost all applicants are awaiting response from YC and not the other way around. If the conclusion of this is you give you short-term exploding offer, the accelerators have got it all wrong. Instead, the right perspective is that they need to make their value prop as strong as a YC. Glass half-full/half-empty, remember?
I read that and wondered something similar. One can argue either there was a lot of 'air' in the Intel pricing and some competition had deflated it, or they are getting pretty astonishing yields on their 22nm process. Probably a bit of both but still an interesting price point.
Security Audit of Safeplug “Tor in a Box”
I believe NoScript will pop up a message asking if you want to take the redirect, in that case.
pardon my ignorance, but in the last line, how does json::decode knows it should decode to a json::DecodeResult<Point> rather than a json::DecodeResult<Whatever> ?
In the comment that person says:

> I understand your anger, but this is a volunteer. It seems obvous to me too that he messed up because the latest version is broken for me too. but let's cut him a little slack

I also don't agree. This project is featured on the homepage of add-ons list and I bet thousands of people rely on it. That's not how things work, software should be tested. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
Casual – Visual and Simple Project Management
In finance it was usually around 2 days.
"SHA1 and other hash algorithms generate a digital fingerprint that in theory is unique for each different file or text input they sign."

... and there it goes, any credibility I would give the author. There's dumbing down the content for a non-technical audience, and there's not understanding.
Pong With Me
This was my team's project at MHacks IV. Feel free to ask me any questions about how the game works.
Leading edge production process? 22nm is 2 years old and on its way out. 14nm is the leading edge right now from Intel.

Also the rest of the industry is moving to 20nm this fall. In fact, Apple's new A8 is likely built on 20nm from both Samsung and TSMC.
Ask HN: What accounting software would you recommend?
For a startup whose accounting is currently being done by a non-financial-professional who has a working knowledge of accounting principles. There seems to be an overabundance of options and unlike with databases/CMSs/frameworks I can't seem to pick out which ones seem to be the most popular.
Managing "hundreds and hundreds" of dependencies is a simple task with simple build scripts. You have a much bigger problem if you're doing things like this manually. If you want a fine-tuned server version of your distro, chances are it's out there already anyway.
That's the way Microsoft do it, yes. They have certificate pinning in the OS for updates (it isn't technically self-signed, but same principle).

FinFisher was exploiting insecure updates but they aren't the only game in town. There was, and still is, software around which only validates if the certificate is valid (via the OS) and little more, then will happily install the update as root.

As far as I know OS X is no longer vulnerable. I was just using that as an example to show that "anything" could be targeted that has automatic updates.
Companies ignore. Hacking in competitive games
The Home Depot confirms payment systems breach
It's almost like HN has only discovered Anandtech with the news about Anand leaving the site.
5 Industry Insider Tips on Pitching to a Restaurant
what's wrong with that statement exactly?
Thanks jmathai. Re ambassadors, we got so many request of people who just wanted to help out, so at this point this is just an awesome group of early brand supporters. Love noondaycollection.com, would love to connect!
On Btrfs an unprivileged user can create subvolumes/snapshots. There's a mount option that lets them remove subvolumes they own.
I've been through college level statistics classes. Nothing I learned in them suggested that holding currency for less than a year was an appropriate measure of savings.

You're complaining that Bitcoin hasn't been around long enough to make a proper measure of its performance. Then you complain that people who gave control of their coins to Mt Gox didn't get their coins back.

I don't understand what these complaints have to do with the fact that Bitcoin has been a fantastic savings vehicle for five years running. (Or four if you prefer)
"We'll send you an invitation to this address"

That's not grammatically correct. Write "We'll send an invitation to this address" instead.
"Some view it as a best practice"

NO, IT IS NOT

That's probably the stupidest thing I've heard today

Things in IT change all the time. Heck, even non technical things. One text saying something, even if about something pretty "stable", may change tomorrow. It's one of the most important contextual information we have.

I shouldn't have to explain why not having a date is BS so I won't. Time is money after all.

ALWAYS date your texts, and brush your teeth (even though tomorrow someone may come up with something better)
I know I've beaten this drum on HN in the past, but one of the things I most love about Watsi is that you can set up a monthly automatic donation: https://watsi.org/monthly This makes it absolutely trivial to set it and help someone out every month, without having to do anything yourself (and thus, no way to forget it!)

They really do amazing work; congrats on two years, guys.
Well numbers prove you wrong. A year ago 1 bitcoin was worth $125 and is now worth $480. A year ago 1 ARS was worth $0.17 but is now worth $0.12. One currency appreciated, the other lost value. Clearly an Argentinian would have been better off putting an investment in Bitcoin than in the Argentine peso.

Bitcoin certainly is volatile (down from $1000+), but on the long term, if you hold it for at LEAST 1 year, it seems to at least keep value, if not gain value.
What version are you using? I don't have that option in 1.7.0_60
Thanks ! Didn't know that one, but seems to be this.

Doesn't seem to really take off - 6000 users in France after 3 years of operations (data from a french article a year ago, not sure if reliable), and their FB page has last posts about a year ago too - I would say it's dead now.

I'm gonna take a look why it didn't take off.

Btw, the same idea in UK - Cookisto.
Oh, Intel definitely has huge margins on its chips, especially the higher-end ones (the higher, the bigger the margin). Intel could use quite a bit more "deflating" there. Even in laptops, which are quite mainstream and getting rapidly commoditized right now (mostly due to some "indirect" competition from ARM devices), Intel's chips are the highest margin component (perhaps with the exception of SSDs, but they probably beat that, too), and Intel's chips can represent up to 40 percent of a laptop's BOM, compared to 10-15 percent for ARM chips in mobile devices.

If you have been wondering why laptops have gotten such terrible displays (or other components) for so long, this is the reason. OEMs have no room for anything else when the processor is 40 percent of their cost.
> Some view it as a best practice: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/content-m....

A marketing best practice; concealing information that might be of positive value to very many users because some users will treat it as a negative input (perhaps incorrectly in some cases, but that's not really important one way or the other from a marketing perspective) has obvious content marketing utility.

That doesn't mean it isn't universally a disservice to thoughtful readers.
>If you have automatic updates turned on, there's nothing stopping them from MiTM-ling that

What a bunch of stupid, misinformed FUD.
Case in point: programming GPIOs with Python in Raspberry Pi. I don't have data but I'd bet it's the most frequent use case after lightweight server and media center.
It really isn't all that special or complicated. The biggest riff (that I have seen) which gives it a bad reputation is browsers coming up with their own conflicting or awkward APIs. (which is one reason why jQuery exists)
> And if not, then if the first choice turns it down, you make an exploding offer to the second (to be fair to the next 8), and again to the third (to be fair to the next 7), etc. Is there ever a situation where an exploding offer is not in everyone's best interest?

The ideal scenario would be if it were socially acceptable to rescind offers—thus making the exploding offer unnecessary. An employer could make offers to everyone they're interested in, see who accepts, and then stay with them (essentially, allow parallel analysis on both sides). Instead, candidates can have multiple simultaneous offers while companies can only make offers sequentially. Hence the exploding offers.
Can you pick 20 small cap stocks which have outperformed the dollar over four years? Are there tens of thousands of merchants that will accept said stocks as payment for their products? Are there payroll systems and employees eager to accept these stocks as wages?

The fact that my post is even controversial is kind of silly if you think about it. All you're saying is, "Yeah, but!"
My sister lives and works and Scotland on visa (we're American).

She (and others in her position) are worried that this passing may well end up with her visa not getting renewed or cancelled as they are UK viasas rather than Scottish ones.

Could be interesting times for ex-pats living in Scotland!
What the ever-loving hell does that even mean?
Docker[1] and VMware[2] seem to agree with you.

[1] https://blog.docker.com/2014/08/docker-vmware-1-1-3/

[2] http://cto.vmware.com/vmware-containers-containers-without-c...
Is My Shift Key on or Not?
It's the chains of being responsible for the security :-)

Integration between various companies, nothing more. We're a hub.
Lets fight all together for our right: the net neutrality
Firebug. Chrome doesn't have anything as responsive.
However, Firebug STILL does not support source maps. I have been jumping between tools for this reason alone. Usually, Firefox is my primary browser for dev work.
Emscripten and asm.js: C++'s role in the modern web
Hell, It's About Time – reddit now supports full-site HTTPS
As usual, problems come when reading someone else's code, not writing your own.
Yeah, if it doesn't have a date, that's (to me) a much stronger negative signal than an old date. If its old, I can take that into account (and, particularly, I can properly contextualize it and understand what it must not have considered because of timing.)

If it doesn't have a date, I can't contextualize it, and its value drops.