skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all you read about public key, it's somewhat rare in workhorse production systems.

I disagree. Sure, most data gets encrypted or signed using shared-key systems; but those shared keys are almost always negotiated using public key crypto. Don't forget that if you can break RSA, you can write yourself an SSL certificate identifying yourself as anything you want.

There is probably another 10 years before there's even an academic result against 1024 bit RSA keys.

Given the maxim that the NSA is always 10 years ahead of academic cryptographers, I'd say this is a very good reason to not trust 1024-bit RSA any more.
we've had this argument before I recall ;)

> I wonder if there's a study into how successful internet child porn laws are at actually preventing crime.

I dont know of one. The trouble is work in that area is actually classified (I cant remember to what level). So we can only work with the data we know of (i.e. ours) - same for every company/force working on such cases. Second problem is that it is usually quite a fragmented field from detection through investigation and to trial that collating accurate stats is even harder.

I might try to put something together though.

In terms of:

> We're living in an age where you can view videos of beheadings, people send around youtubes of some guy being electricuted on top of a train.

I actually agree the law is a bit wierd here. For example if those images or video's also included something class able as pornography it become extreme porn and hence illegal (at least here in the UK). Im not really sure where I stand on that (apart from the fact that the point is the viewer is more likely "getting off" on the porn or something)

> but post a pic of your baby enjoying bathtime and you'll be hunted down and burned as a witch

If you post it on a pedophile network well, then, probably you will be :) On other sites? Highly unlikely. And if you are investigated someone like me will prove the negative.

Please dont forget; the VAST majority of people are caught in 3 ways:

- by actively downloading from known and watched pedophile networks

- by being caught IRL by someone and reported to the police

- by grooming youngsters on the web and the victim / victims parents reporting it (sort of like #2 but more pro-active)

As to the legality or morality of viewing these images; I choose not to comment. Because I suspect we differ entirely there.

With all of that said:

> and that there a thousands of them ready to strike on YOUR kids when you least expect it.

I could not agree more with such a sentiment. It really annoys me (along with my colleagues) that the media/govt. persist these attitudes. It actually damages our efforts too.
Improving conversion rates may very well add value. 'Value' != 'features', it's entirely possible that a site has a bad conversion rate because it's confusing or hard to use. A/B testing helps to improve this, which is certainly 'more value' in my mind.
I'm interested too. I'm guessing the data is actually encoded into the character as they do look ever so slightly different with different content.

This would suggest this means that you can create a dynamic font/character in unicode. I had no idea this was possible, can someone confirm/slap me down for saying silly things?
Should Fines be Wealth-dependent?
I don't live anywhere near the US and I really really wish Palm would actually release some form of the Palm Pre where I live. It's been... what, a year since it was first launched and still no version for the South East Asian market.
768-bit RSA is no less safe now than it was last week.

Indeed. It was completely unsafe last week, and it is still completely unsafe.

Stunts like this are like terrorist attacks: They don't make you unsafe; they merely remind you that you're unsafe.
No matter how "global" you are, you have to be registered somewhere and deal with the local authorities. You have to pay taxes somewhere. You have to obey the local employment laws. You are dependent on the quality of local infrastructure (no matter where your servers are hosted, you need electricity, broadband etc in your offices). Location is important.
Windows 7 Crack
Everyone is well aware that the Windows 7 crack is now available in the market. It has more or less coincided with the time of the Windows 7 RTM release by Microsoft and hackers have cleverly used this to activate and validate the Windows 7 Ultimate version of the Microsoft Operating system.
Has anyone credibly argued that view-source should be removed from browsers? Or that we should move away from sending plain-text HTML and JavaScript [1] so that websites can hide their source code?

If not, then I'm not sure what the point of the piece is.

[1] I realize that many places obfuscate their JS source. But there is a significant step from that to advocating changing the web's infrastructure so that we send what are essentially binaries instead of plain-text source.
Disruptive Biotech Ideas to Watch
So you want $20 and if you succeed in reaching your goal, you then want me to create art to display in your gallery. If that artwork sells, you then take a cut. If you don't succeed in reaching your goal, you keep my $20...

Sounds risk free for you.
I was thinking along these lines as well. I was keen on Appjet and I think it would be great if that void were filled with something node.js-based. (Or maybe narwhal? Or both?)
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day .. ; )

I believe it is a systemic problem. Yes, the media is involved, but they're just giving the public what they want. The institutions we have were formed in the mid-20th century to stop what was then legitimate child neglect/abuse. They succeeded in the 70s, but they didn't disband. They merely redefined abuse, and continue to do so, and today they are part of the government itself. They are the ones who feed the media, and with the credibility of government encourage the fear epidemic, as it's in line with their interests.

The institutions in our government are out of control and this is happening everywhere. It's not a USA or UK or AU problem; we all have the same cancer.
Correct me if I'm missing something, but won't this require that you raise $700k or so, so you can pay the taxes, and then spend the $400k?

That strikes me as... ambitious.

Also, the whole thing seems much more 'help me out of my problem!' than 'let me do something cool for you!' I think if you want a good shot of this working, you need to frame it very differently, and find a way to provide easily communicated value to the donors.
Of course CUDA would be used for this eventually. I'm surprised it's written against CUDA and not OpenCL which I think CUDA enabled chips also support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
I hate to be that guy, but this sounds crazy.

Let me get this straight: You want 20,000 people to send you $20 each, and a postcard. You'll have an exhibition of these 20,000 postcards, and send the "artists" 60% of the sales price of whatever postcards you happen to sell. So, if someone picks my postcard out of the 20,000 and then decides to pay $33 for it, I break even.

Huh?

So, that's how I react. I would expect response to be close to nil.

What would I recommend instead? Well, first of all, I would continue to work banks/foundations/investors. If you have a viable business plan, and a piece of property with some value, you should be able to raise some money (and leave a gap significantly less than $400K).

If you are going to crowdsource the remainder, I'd either a) go with straight donations-- it's simpler, and more honest, or b) raise the "donation" amount to $100/$200, and use it as an "entry fee" in a skill-based contest (not a game of chance-- you'll want to talk to a lawyer about gaming laws) with a big enough payout to raise interest (i.e., a slice of the company, or a piece of the property, etc.).
Feynman and the (Nanotech) Futurists
Smart Mattresses™
I don't think it correlates at all.

The only important thing here is having people behind a project that care, respond to any queries, and are actively developing/fixing/maintaining.

Good software isn't good because it's open or closed source. It's good because people are sitting behind it and care about it.

That's personally all I care about - that the people 'behind' the software care, and will fix any issues that need fixing.
I think it's unfair to claim "built-in decay" is unique to leveraged ETFs. This happens with all financial instruments: stocks, funds, ETFs, futures, options, etc. Any price that goes up X% and then down X%, or vice versa, ends up lower than the starting point. For any instrument.

The only difference with the leveraged instruments is the corresponding loss is greater. But that's the whole point of using leverage -- the gain is greater, too.
As a student this is very interesting since it could also be used to measure self progress. There's a myriad of ways to test your abilities in most subjects, but if I want to find out if I'm any good at programming or to measure my progress, there are very few easy ways to do that. Are you going to sell this to just business's?
It's very interesting to see the hijacking of Drexler's vision by the science establishment get an airing on the OPED page of The Wall Street Journal, let alone one that's so honest.
No, the above argument leaves room for diminishing returns - it only assumes that spending more time learning foo is more efficient at learning foo than spending more time learning bar is at learning foo.

Suppose Alice and Bob have similar levels of talent. Alice spent 10000 hours learning the piano. Bob spent 2000 hours learning the piano, 2000 learning the violin, 2000 learning percussion, 2000 learning to sing and 2000 writing a novel. The above argues that Alice will be better at playing the piano than Bob. Probably not five times better (assuming that could be defined in a sensible fashion) - there are diminishing returns - but still better.
Nude pictures of children are usually "allowed" if they are for "artistic purposes" and dont depict them in a sexual way. I think the way they do it is grade them Level 1 but dont prosecute for it if there is no sexual context. (this is.. shaky... Im unsure of the law because I have only seen foreign cases/examples in this area)

So this case is strange; it's not something I would have expected to see go to trial.

The only thing I can think of is that there doesn't appear to have been any need to photograph them actually topless/nude in order to create the photo's - and so they might be judge gratuitous. 150hrs community service is light for a child sex offence - it's just above an official slap on the wrist I would say. So it could be the judge wanted to impress on the guy to be careful in future (or something).

Ultimately the CPS were at fault there, IMO, in taking it to court.
It's reasonable, it just seems improbable.

You need $400,000, and you're going to take donations $20 at a time. That's 20,000 people. Let's even say 10,000 people (you have some cash of your own, some people will just give you free money).

I think this is the sort of thing that you end up stuck in the middle. You'll raise $5,000, and get stuck in red tape around tracking and paying taxes on the "donations", and won't have gotten any measurable amount closer to your goal.
Top Tools for Making and Keeping Your Site Successful
>> "As to the legality or morality of viewing these images; I choose not to comment. Because I suspect we differ entirely there."

Are you saying you believe simply viewing particular light patterns should be a crime? It's just bizarre. But as you say, I guess we disagree on that point.

Should "thinking inappropriate thoughts about minors" be a crime also? Should we develop brain monitors and all wear funny hats?

If you believe viewing such images should be illegal, then even law enforcement officers should not be able to view them - otherwise how do we know if they secretly 'enjoy' looking at them. The whole sorry exercise is one of thought policing.
I use it because it's free, in active development, and pretty much works well...

... and how many closed-source projects meet the same criteria?

A few loss leaders here and there, I suppose: Flash, a few web browsers. Though John Gruber, among others, might dispute the statement that Flash "works well": http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/tablet_musings

Although I do wonder how many people actively go through open source projects looking at code

Not that many people, really. Just the talented open-source developers, the ones who do important foundational work. Or the ones who want to become talented, and perhaps someday accomplish some significant foundational work. Or the ones who want to accomplish something that doesn't come right out of a can, which includes the majority of the Drupal and Rails programmers that I've met. Still, a small fraction of humanity.

But that misses the point. In an ideal world, nobody would ever need to read the code for open source projects: The code would work 100% of the time, and would do just what you want, and would have comprehensive and readable documentation. Even now, the open-source code I use works an astonishing percentage of the time. The point is that you don't want the one occasion when it stops working to grind your project to a halt for two years while you lobby the manufacturer for a new release, or beg for explanations of obscure algorithms, or pay thousands of dollars for a proprietary training course, or prostrate yourself before the author on the internet and beg for some attention to your particular problems:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034584

It's true that, paradoxically, people who work with open source tools don't spend a lot of time using or thinking about their ability to read the source code. They don't have to. On the rare occasions when they have to use the source, they just do it and move on, with relatively little loss of time and no worries.
I tried posting a long (more than 140 chars) one of these on twitter, but it seems they cut it off because it won't decode. (Checksum error.) Bummer.. would have been a fun loophole. :P

Update: Actually, sending a short one via the twitter client I'm working on seems to mangle it as it won't decode after it's posted. Posted short ones via the web interface will decode correctly, though. There must be a unicode handling bug somewhere...
They could have followed the processing.js style and named it processing.py
I do wonder how they were doing. I tried out FiltrBox and after the trial they wanted $1k/yr for the service. Suffice to say we weren't their target market.
Very similar article posted earlier:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035155
Claim some level of security, and you've instantly become a target. Either given enough people poking at it intelligently, or a enough computers brute forcing it nearly anything can be cracked. Of course, when people do the cracking it often ends up showing some design flaws in the product.
FWIW, I've been coding Ruby going on 7 years now (well over 100,000 lines of Ruby across all projects, I'd wager), and my memory estimates fewer than 5 instances of "undetectable typo". Generally, the typos I made and tried to run produced very obvious, visible and traceable symptoms (i.e. a precise and accurate stack trace).

I was asked in an interview once (by a skeptic that didn't know Ruby) if it weren't a problem that mistyping a variable name could produce a bug that would be difficult to detect and debug. I informed him that, in practice, it is essentially a non-issue.

There are two aspects of Ruby (among others, I'm sure) that help protect against the sort of hidden bugs you're worried about:

1) You cannot reference a variable that has not been defined yet. Example:

% ruby
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious = "something quite attrocious"
puts "I'm thinking of #{supercalifragilisticexpialodocious}."
^D
-:2: undefined local variable or method `supercalifragilisticexpialodocious' for main:Object (NameError)

2) Ruby will not silently or automatically convert or cast data types. (Where it seems to do so, in actual fact underlying library code is explicitly calling the conversion methods (#to_s, #to_i, #to_f, etc.)) Example:

% ruby
count_str = "8"
count = count_str.to_i
puts count < 9
puts count_str < 9
^D
true
-:4:in `<': comparison of String with 9 failed (ArgumentError)

Contrast that with, say, Perl:

% perl
use strict;
my $count_str = "8";
my $count = 0 + $count_str;
print $count < 9; print "\n";
print $count_str < 9; print "\n";
^D
1
1

Combine all of the above with good testing practices, and your bugs turn out to be quite detectable on the whole.
Great advice, thank you!
Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software
You can do whatever you want - it just has to return the correct result.

It isn't that difficult to solve, but I like the idea.
I think wealth dependent fines are a good idea in some cases, but not for the same reason as the author. To me, it has nothing to do with tempering fines or accounting for error. It has to do with the simple fact that $100 means vastly different things to different people. For someone living in real poverty, $100 could change their life. For the average American, it's a nice chunk of change but certainly nothing life-altering. For the rich, it's pocket change. $100 to someone with a net worth of $20m is like 50 cents to someone with a net worth of $100k. If you got a traffic ticket and it was for 50 cents, would that constitute any deterrent at all? It certainly wouldn't for me. If I knew the fine was only going to be 50 cents, I would probably drive at least 35 mph over the limit in some places. A constant amount of money does not mean a constant fine. Charging a sufficiently rich person with a $100 fine is as good as not charging any fine at all. A constant percent of net worth comes much closer to being a real constant fine.
What happens if I get an e-mail or sms during the night? Will the vibrator cause the app to think I am awake?
What am I missing? How do you decode it?
Characters can have different accents or modifications on them. For example, the letter "e" can be "é" or "è" or "ë", etc. The interesting thing being done here is layering multiple diacritical marks on top of the slash character and then decoding those marks back into plain text.
Why? After all, you are going to use the internet while on the job too.
Just making the problems more difficult should fix that problem.
May be after performing various crypto operations, the effect of the password gets cancelled out or something.
The worst thing for me about open source is the mass of abandoned projects no one cares about any more.

Don't get me wrong, I like open source and use it a ton, but it's not the only way.

As I say, IMHO the main thing is that someone is behind the software that cares.
You go to the page linked in the story, paste the tadpole-looking character into the field at the top, and press the "convert (0-4kbyte)" button.
The young and the jobless
I'm not sure whats more interesting, the post, or the fact that its from att.net

For serious.
I wonder what the response is of the audiophiles who were claiming that these were original recordings? I know those types don't like to be debunked by 'science'. They seemed fairly adamant about this hoax being true and were somewhat insulting to anyone who thought differently.
Apparently not...
http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2005/05/yeah_sure_consi.html
Wow thanks! That was super helpful. I will check out your blog as well.
How about a realtime ray-traced version of multiple balls, with the viewpoint turning around the balls?
>> ... and how many closed-source projects meet the same criteria?

Most websites are closed source, free, and in active development. I think the model works well.

If things are broken, they're usually fixed quickly as long as someone behind the website cares about it.
Agreed.

I find the critical comments interesting, too, as they are the sorts of things we programmers say when someone points out the issues in our products.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

"The problem is clearly between the keyboard and the chair."
Wow, you can't have your picture taken under a tree, without it being thought you spend all day there?
The clojure maven plugin allows you to set up a swank session that you can interact with using emacs. This is the type of web development that you mention and was a revelation for me when I tried it 2 weeks ago -- especially combined with Firefox autorefresh.

Theres nothing to stop somebody from using swank for development and then switching to a web.xml and
war file for deployment.

Also it seems that in the clojure community, maven has a competitor:
http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen
What guarantees the existence of such people, if not the freedom of the software ? The only moment a free software project can die is by having (almost) no user who cares any more. Proprietary software is often not as long lived.

EDIT: Clarification (apparently, the above is cryptic enough to warrant a downmod): in any software project, the founders of the project can quit, go broke, die, or just be much less active. And no one can guarantee that it won't happen.

If the software is GPL, you have the guarantee that when that happens, some more developers can jump in and take the lead. If no one do so that means only one thing: no one cares enough (including users, which could hire someone). Good riddance. Example: CVS is dying because everyone is willing to switch to SVN.

If the software is proprietary, that possibility may be denied by the original founders. Which means a proprietary software can die while people still care. Example: old versions of Windows or Word, or games on old platforms.

Which leads to the obvious question: for any proprietary software, can you guarantee that it won't die before no one cares? I think not.
You can pay someone other than the original developer, which is a HUGE difference.

If you want some specific core feature in MS Office, you need to petition MS and hope they'll add it someday. If you want the same core feature in OpenOffice.org, there are experts in the OOo codebase that could do it all around the world, you could pay someone at Sun, someone at IBM, or someone that is freelance, it's your choice, and you have a free market to find who will make the change at the lowest price.
Google tax: France could start taxing online giants for advertising revenue
France could start taxing internet advertising revenue from online giants such as Google, according to a government proposal.
Top technology palm face moments of 2009
Things I learnt by not writing tests
With an "improved" syntax like that, C++ programmers will never discover automated refactoring.
The central point of the article is that non-GPL licenses are not wrong, and a GPL exception is no worse than a non-GPL license. I think this point is very clearly spelled out.
I don't mean the interviewers should shut off internet access entirely, but what I mean is that if they do allow access to the internet, they'll need to check the interviewee hasn't just googled for the solution to their codibility test (and they'll also have to make sure the interviewee can't delete their browsing history too).
I also found the clock annoying. If someone does this for an interview they're likely to feel enough pressure anyways. I'd let the test taker hide it and maybe redisplay it automatically with 5 minutes to go.

As for comfy conditions on the job - I would hope that default conditions are comfy. When interviewing I'm more interested in how people will perform day-to-day rather than in rare situations. Most programming jobs don't really require employees to be "cool under pressure."

Other than that, good job on the execution so far. Reminds me a lot of TopCoder, just applied to a specific niche in a good way. I would even consider using this or recommending it to colleagues for hiring.
I'm from Italy and I have a macbook with italian keyboard. Still I switched to the english layout because software and usability is designed for english people and english keyboards.