smanek

I could be diluted to practically nothing, there can be a 'sale' where only 'chosen' people make real cash via golden handcuffs/consulting agreements/signing bonuses, IP can be licensed into a new company, etc.

Depending on the details, some of those things might provide a cause of action for a civil suit but, in practice, I'm not going to get into a protracted court case over, at most, a few hundred thousand. It isn't enough money for a lawyer to take the case on contingency, and I wouldn't want to spend $(X)XX,000 out of pocket or gain a reputation for being litigious. (Of course, the calculus changes if the company is the next Google or FB - but 1000x+ returns are exceedingly rare).

But I still contend that Quora has experts in more domains than HN does. Check out the breadth of industries represented on http://www.quoratop.com/. Of course, it's still tech heavy - but it's more diverse than HN.

It's not perfect - but it's a much better candidate than HN.

Right now, I have b(password, c1) = hash_a stored in my database. To increase the cost to c1+c2, I just replace that with b(hash_a, c2) = hash_b in my database. To verify a user's login, I just compute b(b(password, c1), c2) and compare it to the hash_b I have stored.

Am I missing anything?

Quora arguably has a marginally lower caliber of tech experts, but much higher for many other verticals including business, journalism, media, etc.

I can imagine systems where you provide multiple implementations, and the system automatically finds one that works.

That might include drafting/reviewing things like articles of incorporation, corporate bylaws, vesting agreements, NDAs, IP assignment, contractor and employee paperwork, etc. It's depressingly easy to run up $20K in legal fees at $500/hr.

That's like hearing about a faster-than-light spaceship and asking about what kind of seats it has.

Even assuming they were all on the 1600 point scale, I had a higher aggregate score across only 4 sittings of the SAT (2 in HS, 2 in Junior High), and I'm not particularly unusual in my scores.

See: http://ikaisays.com/2011/01/25/app-engine-datastore-tip-mono...

HBase (and I've heard BigTable) work best with purely random row keys - like the author of this post was using initially.

"It allowed people to share their recent purchases pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction"

I can come up with broad, hand-wavy justifications. But those justifications apply just as well to Blippy.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639

(And the Nature paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7346/full/nature1...)

I'm doing some GC tuning these days - and there seems to be a lot of false/stale information out there. Something this readable, but accurate, would be helpful.

Still there is good reason that browsers rub it in the users face when a site tries to use a self-signed certificate

but I don't see where you say what that good reason is.

If a self-signed cert is more secure than plain HTTP, why make a self-signed cert more painful to use than plain HTTP?

I don't know if browsers do this, but in principle they could even notify the user on certificate change, so the MITM would have to be on the first connection to a site.

Can you think of any counter examples? (Note: I'm a security noob - so I'm asking out of sincere curiosity).

It's not as good as one signed by an ostensibly trusted CA, but it's strictly better than plain HTTP (no sniffing, harder MITM, etc) - so why not present it to the user the same way that plain HTTP is?

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if trusted CAs 'lobby' browser vendors to make it so?

Interestingly, the examples he gave of good URIs (e.g., http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9814/nsf9814.htm) are still working 12 years later, while the bad ones are broken (e.g., http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/pubsys/browser/odbrowse.pl).

If you're using Lucene, it's not too difficult to write your own query parser that does exactly what you want, including fuzzy searches, spelling correction, term weighting, etc. My current employer has a rather involved one that can take advantage of lots of application specific data.

Writing a custom query parser allows you to do as much hidden magic on the query as you want, and expose your own special operators if you really want to. Check out some of our user accessible operators at http://help.greplin.com/customer/portal/articles/15527-how-c...

Incidentally, I'd love to exchange notes and hear about your your search engine sometime. If you're interested, shoot me an email (address in profile).

While that's not the fastest thing in the world (e.g., a good SSD will outperform a 16 drive EBS Raid for most workloads), I don't think it's fair to characterize it as 'slow as molasses'.

I don't know if that's what actually happening, but testing seems to confirm that RAID performance is more consistent than single drive performance.

RAID0 on EC2 isn't as insane as it appears at first glance. EBS's have an annual failure rate of around 0.2%, while hard drives are around 5%. So, the chances of 1 EBS drive failing is around the same as the chance of 2 physical hard drives failing (5%^2 = 0.25%). It doesn't sound unreasonable to suggest that a RAID0 of EBSs is about as reliable as a RAID10 of physical drives and more reliable than a RAID5 of physical drives.

See http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/03/oauth-access-to-imaps... for some details.

"Once you’ve started searching, you’ll notice that tweaks to your query show up in real-time as you type each character, the same way they do on Google Instant. And it shows results for partial-word matches (“Tech” would match for both “Technology” and “TechCrunch”) — which Gmail doesn’t do."

And "a message with 500k of attachments showed up in my search results within a second of receiving it. Not too shabby."

Full disclosure: I work at Greplin :-D I'm just proud of the very cool stuff my coworkers are building!