Leon

The level of 'good enough' security for banking is higher than general web browsing. Even though a user input for their CC number would be encrypted in transmission, that encrypted value is not stored for a long period of time. A cookie, even if encrypted, would allow for a greater ease of access, in general, so now it may be possible for a malicious user who is targeting the site to possibly gain many encrypted values - which depending on the encryption algorithm could allow for finding a flaw.

For session management - that's not the only way to handle user information. Often the web server will store a unique hash value and temporarily store the users information on the server with the associated hash. Note: if you're not using sticky sessions on server connects or a distributed server side session object that users info will be lost on reconnect if they hit a different web head.

And no, it is not entirely good enough for session management, which is why when you're on amazon.com or other online sites and you go to your account you are prompted to reenter your password. It is another level of security, but nothing is perfect.

Amazon/ebay/etc would usually do this because they have unencrypted parts of their site you can be directed towards, or unencrypted services, which would expose the cookies in transmission for session information [although I'm pretty sure they've got secure cookies for some parts of their acct mgmt]. Online payment processing force https for cookies and for session management and sets server & client side session timeouts, expire the cookie to prevent any possible future session hijacking, as well as many other procedures to secure their online services. There's a lot to PCI compliance.

edit: as phil said, HMAC is good policy if you store information on users on the client side, but I wouldn't put anything more than user tracking or analytics info in there.

The headline did not end in a question mark.

Can you compare that against the increase in the standard of living, college, housing, vehicle, and food costs? This by itself doesn't mean anything if everything else is increasing in costs faster than the increase in wages...

Yes.

Ah wow, I've never made that much. I keep hearing of developers I've worked with going to new companies and making double what I am now. It always astounds how people say what they're being paid, and how I am just no where near it.

> This just sounds like sour grapes for not getting an invite to the beta.

That is another issue I had with this article. "I hate that large tech companies manage to completely control the initial discussion of their products by controlling who can see it." How is this unlike any other large company? Car manufacturers allow selected press to test drive new vehicles. Movie studios have showings for movie reviewers well before a general audience. This is a well established business model and calling out a single industry to "grow up" reads as someone who is not in touch with the reality of how a lot of businesses operate and why they do. PR is an established field.

I agree there is sexism in the field. The saying of making software for your mom, however, is not a bad thing. If anything I consider this good, even great. Traditionally technology was considered even more of a man's field than today, with little training or encouragement for women. The trend in older generations is more prevalent, which gives rise to the saying. Yet this idea of targeting that demographic explicitly is wonderful, and why the colloquialism is attempting to fight against the long held technological sexism of older generations. Making software for your mom or grandmother is a realistic attempt at solving the problem of lack of technical training for a gender that was largely ignored by technology a few years ago. People are doing something about the situation and bringing in new users to the latest in tech, opening windows into the rest of the tech world.

However, in the long run, this saying should be phased out as it will soon become more sexist with everyone of any gender having full access and encouragement into technology from a young age.

You just proved the authors point.

Yeah, that last part made the article sound like it was attempting to dissuade other programmers from choosing to strike out on their own, as if it had been written by management.

But listening to management about job security is absurd, at least these days it is.

League of Legends is a fun game - it's the only reason I still have a windows install. Good job on making the game awesome.

On the topic of [1], since I've moved to a an area with a greater distribution of black women, this problem has been seriously brought to my attention.

My dating pool has effectively been cut down, with an advantage having gone towards black men since there is little or less difficulty with a black man and a white woman.

Having discussions with friends from outside of the US, especially those who live in Africa, have mentioned this exact situation - that African women have no problems dating a white male but blacks in America show little interest.

It doesn't matter, they've already made the judgement that the schools property is more important than the privacy of children, because they were students.

They shouldn't have activated them once let alone 42 times.

Coopers Rock is a great place! It's great in the spring time.

occam's razor

Both stages have delta waves in the same range but induce different effects on the brain. They're both characterized by the same measure for depth (of sleep).

To clarify with more, specific information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep

This has really become my favorite blog. Lipton is great to read to get a survey of different math/cc topics. Plus he's holding out hope P=NP!

It may be that the older you get the more oblivious you are to sales-marketing; since you can point out several blatant sales-marketing techniques, you fool yourself into believing you are safe from them all. Don't become too overconfident or you'll end up buying something ridiculous and not even know it.

Go with what's familiar and what I use? Sounds like good advice. But I'd still like to work on a project that needs help more than some of the bigger, more recognizable ones that already have droves of dev's trying to help.

What parts of the FreeBSD project could use some help?

EDIT: Their projects page is pretty cool, I might go with one of those projects then. http://www.freebsd.org/projects/projects.html

His sticking point is that the brain or mind could be a physical system that is not computable or equivalent to a Turing machine. If we take the assumption that the mind is a physical system, then it would still only be a matter of time before we found the reason for the difference in computational ability (maybe it would be like Penrose's quantum arguments for the mind), but those systems would still be within reach of implementation within a computer system. The brain is still a combination of proteins, amino acids, and a few other chemicals. We would just have to move to using chemical computers (which are already being researched).

Even following his arguments, it would only be a matter of time before sentient machines are created, equivalent to our own minds.

His arguments against AI are mostly 'just because' and has little proof.

I would like to refer the community to Zawinkski's Law of Software Envelopment[1]

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

And propose a new, modified law for the current generation:

"Every Web 2.0 website attempts to expand until it can chat. Those Web 2.0 websites which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Strange, I just did a search for movie show times in my area earlier and just now, and it seems that some cinemas are missing.

The timing lines up exactly with the gmail outage.

Since those theaters have always been listed in the movie showtime search as long as I can remember, this could be part of a larger service outage. What else is down that they aren't telling us?

works for me

What's a good book on algorithmic trading?

What about the WMAP? It studied the CMB radiation and gives us evidence of the big bang, a flat euclidean universe, the amount and type of matter in the universe, and even more!

Sure, the ultra deep field is cool, but in importance the WMAP picture is waaay more important.

Morgantown, WV

That's some big speculation about AIG, and on the part of having women on a board. What makes you think the board didn't know what was going on? They put, and kept in, the CEO, one of the biggest reasons for AIG's collapse. And besides, it wasn't just their over exposure to mortgage backed securities. It was endemic of the entire company.

Here is a great piece on AIG's collapse, it was previously on HN, and is the best article about it I've read yet: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/aig20090...

That doesn't imply the top 1% isn't there; just that they are more likely to be under-represented. Also, programmers are prone to move to new areas that are more interesting, especially the top/best, so that can skew it back in favor of the upper echelons. It always seems that the mid range to bottom developers are more likely to find somewhere and stay, as they have so much trouble finding a new place to go to. They are the ones that have 'stickyness'.

What is the biggest factor, from what I can tell, is that the best don't send out their resumes but get poached by other companies or use their networking to land a job.

Why? As a stop gap against irrelevant posting?

Guess what, those people have money too. What would happen if this was implemented? It would make it harder for new members to join and establish long time members as incumbents, probably setting things up such that 'unwanted' members would be blocked from the site. That last step is a very short distance from putting in place ways to make it harder against unwanted users.

The way to keep the community going is exactly with that: the community. A fostering of general ideas and a careful watch on discussions should be applied, not more barriers to entry!

Better spam algorithms and community spirit, not exclusive sites!

Steve Yegge's post on this is apt and may help those who haven't read it.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...

I may just be a little absurd pointing this out, but is it really necessary to use twitter speak to preface a reply when the formatting of the conversation implies your target?

I know I am being pedantic and this is not adding much to the conversation, but this has been slowly creeping throughout the internet, much more lately, of the use of twitter speak in seemingly unnecessary places. What influenced you to use it? Is this a good way to track the influence of certain social networks, by their adoption of common idioms in other disparate networks? Can we follow through this idea and scrape networks to find where idioms are being generated and pinpoint hot-spots of the internet?

Ah, this is just opening a can of worms for such a simple style guideline, but what are your thoughts on this anyway?

Have you read the guidelines for HN yet? http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html