rc4algorithm

Because they have the money to pay support staff but choose not to.

Your example is irrelevant because that's part of a paid career, not free labor farmed with manipulative YouTube videos.

In this instance, people are angry about the fact that Google makes a ton of money from these services but feels no obligation to provide support for them.

More generally, welcome to the new normal. The money-spewing circleparty is fizzling out, thankfully. People increasingly feel safe and confident in challenging the morality and societal value of these corporations. Blasé compliance is no longer expected in tech and many of us (those of us that upvote these things) are working to keep it that way.

Google is big, scary, and the new Microsoft, whether or not that's fiscally or professionally convenient for you.

This is a relatively minor issue, but "PGP" and "PGP-Encrypted Message" are probably cleaner subject options. The message is obviously encrypted, so these titles don't leak any information.

> and choose a simple secure IMAP server from the ports.

I hate to be obstinate, but:

1) Most robust "security" of this form is negated if you're running it on a budget VPS. Those things are often extremely and unavoidably insecure for reasons out of your control (out-of-date VM software, insecure control panels, incompetent VM neighbors, etc.).

2) OpenBSD is probably the best option for this. Just use OpenSMTPD and choose a simple secure IMAP server from the ports. OpenBSD is perfectly suited for simple, security-critical applications like mail servers.

To the many of you using Macbooks: be aware the that the caps lock key is deadened/delayed in order to prevent mistaken pressing, and that this is a hardware feature that can't be changed. This may be the case for Mac keyboards and other new systems as well.

Here's the simplest reason in a sentence:

We want to write functions that don't involve IO (which we call "pure functions"), but we want to be able to use these functions on values that have been tainted by IO.

Ex.

The function abs takes an Int and returns its absolute value. No IO there; it takes an Int and returns an Int. However, in a pure language like Haskell, an integer that has been obtained through IO is of type "IO Int". Because Haskell is a pure language, we see that value as "tainted" by IO; it any anything derived from it are irreversibly tainted. A monad lets us pull the Int out of the IO context, get its absolute value with abs, and then stick that back into the IO context. That way, IO-tainted stuff keeps its label warning us that it's IO-tainted, but we can still use pure functions on it. This is necessary because if abs returned an IO Int, we wouldn't know whether or not abs does IO. That's to say, we couldn't get pure values back when we process pure values with abs.

This can be done for any "context", but IO was the most pressing one, and monads are what made IO in pure languages easy enough for them to be usable for everyday problems.

Also, the Paul Graham worship here is pretty bad, but being suspicious of something just because he hasn't mentioned it in an article is really bad.

Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.

It would be interesting to weight the links by the score of the corresponding comment.

I would assume that most of this is biotech investment, however, which is sort of outside the purview of the HN community.

"I saw from the inside a huge multi-mullion dollar Atari-funded game studio go down in flames because the developers didn't know that you can't use disk drives as a CPU: they built almost all of their MMO item inventory logic into SQL triggers and events."

Can someone describe to a newb what's wrong about this?

Check out MariaDB for an open source fork of MySQL. Oracle has handled MySQL extremely poorly since they acquired it from Sun.

Read "The Symposium" by Plato.

I remember there being a really interesting story about a Turkish criminal manufacturing tons of ATM number pad overlays in Kingpin:

http://www.amazon.com/Kingpin-Billion-Dollar-Cybercrime-Unde...

That whole book is full of bizarre and amazing stories about hacking and credit card fraud. It's well written, too; the author was a hacker so the technical descriptions aren't painfully generalized as they too often are. Highly suggested.

A lot of people will suggest Django, and it's definitely the most popular Python web framework (and therefore the most useful if you're looking for a job using one). However, Flask is written in a much more open-ended way that gives you a lot more power to create the structure of the application as you see fit. I've been working with it lately, and I'd suggest giving it a try.

I also have to suggest The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Graham was a genius and revolutionized the financial world. He wrote the book in the 50's, and it has been republished with anecdotes tying it to the modern day many times. The most recent republishing was after the tech boom, so that version has many references to that phenomenon in the anecdotes. However, Graham's original and unabridged words are included as well. He's incredibly lucid and pragmatic, denouncing mysticism for analytic techniques. The book is still considered to be the bible of value investing; Warren Buffett said his investment philosophy was "85% Benjamin Graham."

<i>Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over The Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground</i>: This book won't necessarily teach you all that much, but it is a true story and it's both intensely interesting and not lacking in substance. It's written by a past hacker, as well, so there are no irritating mistakes or hand-holding around technical concepts that can sometimes get annoying in general interest books about computers. I highly suggest reading this, it's captivating and it's the kind of book that gets you excited about computers and the potential they give you.

The only experience I have to offer is at the bottom rung, the smallest possible servers. The one's you use for sandboxes or low-traffic personal sites. I made my decision a week ago, and landed on Rackspace. Their cheapest option is about $12 a month, compared to Linode's $20. Also, if you're new to web administration you'll be helped tremendously by all of the accurate and thorough tutorials they host. However, the two or three people that I know that administer larger sites suggested Linode, so as always your choice should probably depend on your individual needs.