skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once upon a time Theo was considering the Plan9 tool chain for the OpenBSD project. Sadly Lucent's lawyers proved not too adept and writing software licenses in what was a brave new world of OSS.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/browse_thread/t...

The previous license was worse, it had a "make any modifications and you have to send them back to Lucent" clause.

Theo was right and the world was robbed and the now the compilers are available in either GPL, LGPL, Lucent or MIT license form from the Vita Nuova Inferno project.

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/downloads.html
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/contents.html

And a hybrid license through Plan9Ports

http://swtch.com/plan9port/

What a fuck up.
There's a big difference between knowledge, and knowledge applied.
You don't "own" your instance of Basecamp, you just rent it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Some might disagree.

Personally I find SaaS to be a general business imposition with significant long-term costs in terms of lock-in, operational expenditure, and an inherently poor negotiating position with the vendor.

I dislike required service contracts or yearly per-head licensing fees for the same reason.

With more openly licensed software, a key differentiator is that we can choose to continue to use a previous version of the software, whereas if we cease paying for a service, we must migrate all operations, data, and training.
The [Apple] Tablet
Tell HN: Best wishes for a happy and productive next decade.
Hope it's a good one.
"A few days later the TSA, to it's credit..."

Fail.
The more I think about it, the more I think it is almost as simple as saying this: your product team should have its own CMS.

1. Building a CMS is trivial. For us, we found that we could take our designer's deliverable site and just serve the pages up in Sinatra verbatim as Erb instead of HTML. Done!

2. Once your static site is nominally dynamic, you can easily improve it. Trivial things, like integrating analytics, are truly trivial, but even "significant" things are easier in your own code. For instance, screenshots are just a template substitution for us; a tiny piece of markup in any static page, and fwoosh a fully functional lightboxed captioned screenshot.

3. A "real" CMS comes with many hundreds of developer hours put into making admin and workflow "pretty". Wow is our admin/workflow not pretty. Who cares? Your CMS is more agile than a general-purpose CMS because you don't have to put a penny into stuff that doesn't matter.

4. Once you have a dynamic site, you are now in a position to come up with "marketing features", which you won't really think about until you are in that position. Customer lifecycle + Mailchimp? User-generated content? Live-chat based beta product support? Web versions of downloadable products? These are things that are quarterly objectives when you don't have your own CMS, and are weekly objectives when you do.

One thing I forgot to mention in my sprawling parent comment:

You do not know how to do any of this stuff until you start doing it.

Content generation and SEO are a perfect example. You have no idea what you need to do until you get something out there, so you can start monitoring how it gets used. For us, we wrote a page template we thought was nominally effective, and bugged it with Google Analytics. Within days of it getting spidered, the keyword logs had 10+ obvious, trivial changes to make the pages more effective; we literally just had to include a couple more words ("permit" instead of "allow", for instance).

But given that we know this is true (intellectually, if not viscerally) about product development, and we can plainly see that it's true for content generation, it seems fair to suggest that it's axiomatic. You don't know how to "engineer" "marketing" until you start trying to engineer marketing. Which implies: you shouldn't wait to figure out exactly what to do.
So mcherm, I'm pretty sure you don't need any enlightenment on this, but I'll try to peer teach this to whom it may help.

So let's say we have a vector which is represented by the matrix A of any dimension (any # of columns, each column a vector). If we multiply this matrix A with an arbitrary unit vector (considering just the direction in the given dimensions) B, then we'll have a certain set of possible resulting vectors (A X B). The eigenvectors are whenever the same unit vector B lines up in direction with (A X B)--where both vectors are dependent on B, and the eigenvalues are the corresponding scalars which must multiply the unit eigenvector to match the resulting A X B vector. The eigenvector does not have to be a unit vector, but since any multiple of the eigenvector can still be a valid eigenvector, you probably just want the unit vector or at least the lowest whole number reduction. If you reduce the eigenvector, the eigenvalue must be changed too.

In equation form: Ax=Ωx
Where A is a matrix you are trying to transform, and x is the possible eigenvector, and Ω is the eigenvalue.

In graphical form (this was what really did the trick): http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/Tools... (Demo #1)

And the matrices are simply a different form of a set of equations while still preserving their relative properties. The matrix form allows you to easily manipulate the original set of data with matrix operations. I guess the matrix can also just represent a set of column vectors (which are just a direction in a space with a magnitude) too.

Let me know if I got anything wrong.
If the alternative is soap operas or Farmville and $0/hour, why isn't $2.50/hour "fair"?

Not every casual, part-time, voluntary, done-at-your-own-pace-on-your-own-terms activity should have to pay a "living" wage. That sort of standard doesn't "protect" people -- it destroys potential.

"Exploitation" is not a matter of first-world absolute watermarks (like a statutory minimum wage) of the value of people's time. It's a matter of what their other options are. If they have to work for $2.50/hour or starve, that could be a problem. If they choose to work for $2.50/hour rather than watch TV, then something other than exploitation is happening. (And besides the immediate but less-than-minimum-wage benefits, the person could also be building knowledge and skills towards an eventual higher-paid job.)

And if you only prohibit American workers from taking such casual voluntary work, why is it better for the $2.50 to go overseas?
Even with such innovation, it would never match the iPhone touchscreen and I don't think Apple is willing to compromise like that. If Apple do think in this direction, I think it's more practical for them to have 2 equal size screens, an iPhone-like touchscreen for videos, games, and dynamic web browsing and an e-ink screen for reading books, magazine, and static web contents. The touchscreen can be used to control and navigate the e-ink screen (think of your laptop monitor being the eink screen and the keyboard being the touchscreen). It can be folded in like a laptop to protect the 2 screens or fold out (with both screens on the outside) when in used.

Now that is one way Apple will convince me to drop updwards of $600 despite owning a Macbook, iPhone, and a Kindle.
The bigger tragedy is that Israel has been living in a state of war for 50 years.

A little more effort toward peace and less toward locking down society and we'd all be better off.
ps: I nominate 'username as the HN username quoting convention, instead of @username.
I just bought my first electronic book recently in PDF format, without any DRM. As a "book person" I might consider getting an ebook reader at some point in the future, provided that the copyright/licensing issues are clarified and nobody is restricting what files I add or remove from the device. Retailers or publishers should not be able to remove or modify books on an ebook reader without the permission of the owner of the device/books.

Personally I wouldn't knowingly purchase anything which contained DRM, although I realize that probably most consumers aren't as hardcore on these issues as I am.
The MBAs (and lawyers) will do the same to GOOG.
Correction: are doing the same to GOOG.
...or using the fancy bluetooth mouse/keyboard combo Apple already has. I can imagine having this tablet that, if I was at my desk, could basically act like an iMac if it could communicate with a wireless keyboard and/or mouse.
His reasoning appears to be 'no-one has blown a plane up with liquid explosives, therefore it must be working', at least that was the impression I got from the article.
Which is why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed never gets on the suicide flights. Terrorist management is expensive. Terrorist suckers are cheap, and if the history of the Iraq and Palestinian experience is an indicator, will get cheaper as AQ gets more operational experience.
You know, I could do much of my daily work from my iPhone, if only it let me run multiple, unsigned, applications and use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Add an external monitor port and USB for drives and printers, and I'm happy. The iPhone 3G is already as powerful as a mid 90's desktop.
Another thing to note - Matt Blaze typically approaches security scenarios with a different cost/benefit perspective than Schneier, for example Blaze writes:

"The TSA's much maligned "three ounce" liquid rule is, in fact, a nice example of good security engineering of this kind. "

Schneier, on the other hand, considers the inconvenience to travelers to be not worth the hassle. He always seems to fail to recognize the principles of defense-in-depth, and over-emphasizes the importance of stopping the terrorist before they launch an attack. I say this as someone who has ready pretty much every essay and book he has ever written, sometimes multiple times.

For example:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/terrorism_secu...

". Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition."

o Banning box-cutters (and other sharp devices) has made it much more difficult to bring on an _effective_ weapon on board a plane. Nobody is denying that you can still fashion a shiv, of some kind - but the amount of damage you can do with a roughly fashioned hand weapon, versus something designed to kill lots of people at close range, is enough to deter people from trying to do so. Note - one of the principal reasons for banning box cutters and their like is so that the _other_ passengers on the plane have a pretty straightforward mechanism for subduing a malevolent passenger.

o Banning Large amounts of liquids, in the face of Liquid Bombs being _actually designed_ just makes good sense. Likewise banning powdered substances (PETN) from being brought onto planes makes sense now that we know that there are active attempts to use this vector.

Focusing on tactics is actually a very effective proposition - It's actually pretty damn difficult to bring down a plane these days from inside - not impossible, I'm sure there are a lot of vectors still left, but they are getting pretty few and far between. Not to say you don't still try and stop attacks at their source, but, if one gets by - you hope that further lines of defense will stop them.
Because they're not very useful if nobody knows what they are or what they do.

I suppose they're kind of cute, in an easter-egg sort of sense. But I really don't see why HN just couldn't have a regular landing page or maybe a sidebar with these links on them, along with maybe a caption or tooltip describing what they're for.

Why all the mystery? It really makes the site much less useful for huge numbers of people to keep this stuff semi-hidden.
Results of OOP practices survey (3783 respondents)
Too much talk, too little action. Airport security is to be treated seriously by all countries.
I'm somewhat surprised - but gratified - to read my post on Hacker News. I posted it mostly as a sort of very dry, tongue-firmly-in-cheek public memo to various people I know who are always telling me why I really need to "get with cloud computing". The idea was to prompt said people into seeing that those of us who don't immediately respond with excitement when told about online services like Google Docs and hurriedly jump on the bandwagon might actually have some relatively sound reasons for it. Lots of people I know seem to get very excited about stuff because it's new, and seem to be on automatic optimism mode about all new technology. The attitude I think is much healthier is a bit of guarded scepticism or realism. The Luddite would refuse new technology flatly - they want the world to stop so they can get off. Instead, I was hoping to push my readers (mostly my personal friends IRL) through a rather absurd example to try and step back from the Digg/TechCrunch/Twitter-driven hype and try to ask themselves "do you really need it?".

As for the earlier suggestion that I should retire, I most certainly would like to, but I'm in my twenties (it is perfectly possible to have used a typewriter frequently as a child and now be in one's twenties). Old school doesn't equal old. I'm a programmer in my spare time and do independent development projects to pay my way through philosophy grad school. I think Google Docs has a perfect use - I use it a fair amount for planning (the podcast I'm involved in uses it, and we used it quite a lot to plan a vacation). I'm not advocating using a typewriter instead of Eclipse or instead of whatever you use for word processing. What I'd like is if some of my geek friends would learn the lessons of technological history and maybe try some of the old tech they think desperately needs to be deprecated in order to bring about some technological paradise. It's not all bad.

I'm not opposed to technological change. I'm opposed to people thinking technology is automatically good because it is new and automatically needs to be made obselete because it is old.
I know this isn't exactly HN related, but I was hoping someone could help me with the sleep deprivation problem
Ramping up a new KSM has a high cost. Ramping up a mujahedeen to skirmish with NATO in Khost has a high cost. Ramping up the guys who know how to rig PETN bombs has high cost. Ramping up guys who can operate safe houses and route money through a paranoid cell system has a high cost.

Building the system has a high cost. Using the system to exploit the dumbfucks who get captured by the system in order to get them to put the explosive underpants on is cheap.

If the system was jeopardized by any terrorist attempt, you'd be right. But it isn't. It's like spam. It may have a 0.001% conversion rate, but as long as it pays off 10000000:1, it's sustainable and resilient.
Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for.

Inspiration counts for something.
I agree with all of the above. It is almost the shadow case for Rails or your web framework of choice: the last 2+ years of development of my website has been starting with a 300 line core and then just bolting stuff on. (And when I say "stuff", I mean everything from my own automated bookkeeping system to A/B testing to the web version of my product.)

Thomas has teams of smart people he can deploy to have quarterly objectives, but I don't, so I generally look to Things I Can Get Done In A Weekend, which typically means little 300 to 500 line featurelets. Somewhat surprisingly, that actually works.

(Incidentally, while adding new features to the product often takes significant amount of time to test, little marketing featurelettes are often self-contained and more or less consequence-free. The Q/A cycle on them is pretty much "Re-run existing tests and observe they don't break." followed by "Deploy to production.")

Like Thomas says, most of this stuff will not obviously be on the roadmap when you start out. Often, you'll discover in the course of reviewing usage of Featurelette 17 that there is an opportunity for improvement or (cringes) synergy, so you just schedule Featurelette 18 to bolt on a little more.

I could tell you a dozen stories that fit that pattern. "Hey, I bet it would help to have a web app. Hey, why doesn't my web app have dedicated landing pages? Hey, I could reuse content from the CMS to populate those landing pages."
What is the alternatives to preventing liquid bombs from bringing down an Airplane? What Matt Blaze is saying, is that instead of eliminating _all_ liquids (which would have also prevented aircraft from catastrophic explosions) - the TSA simply did the engineering to determine what the smallest amount of liquid was required to do significant damage, and then limited bottled liquids to something smaller than that. People can still bring on toothpaste, shampoo, and other useful liquids/medicines, but at the same time can't bring them on in large enough volumes to destroy an airplane.
Couple friends of mine let their two daughters, ages 5 and 10, walk to the park alone. A block away (within shouting distance), with a cell phone, and mom home and ready to come get them if there was any trouble.

Their ex-roommate called Child Protective Services on them.

They were eventually cleared, but the whole experience was a hugely stressful nightmare for them, with multiple visits by social workers and threats to take their children away. So yeah, your parents would probably be reported for child neglect if they let you roam free like that.
To continue the baseless speculation: I think your second point would be closer to likely because old and busted lacks the touch screen input in this case.
Kip Hawley, former head of the TSA has answered this question a number of times, including conversations with Schneier. Most of the liquids that can do the type of damage the TSA are concerned about are likely highly oxygen reactive, or otherwise have significant obstacles to being combined outside of a lab environment.

If that weren't the case, the TSA would have simply banned all liquids.
Getting caught this time was a huge win. By all accounts, the guy who got caught was a nobody. Had he even been to the camps for training? For the cost of a pair of explosive underpants and the life of one shmuck, AQ is once again top-of-mind in the west --- not to mention the tens of millions of dollars of disruption the stunt caused.

There is a practically limitless supply of shmucks out there for AQ to weaponize. All they have to do is get better at converting them. What evidence do we have that this will be a long-term operational problem for AQ? Everything I see indicates that they will get better at it, not worse.

This is also why they aren't shutting down traffic lights. A failed attempt to shut down traffic lights wins nothing. Nobody is viscerally afraid of darkened traffic lights. In fact, until it happens, nobody is going to be viscerally afraid of someone taking out the grid. But everyone is afraid in their gut of exploding planes. Just the threat --- just 5% of the threat --- is enough to wreak havoc.
The current decade doesn't end until December 31st 2010. The Gregorian calendar counts starting from 1 -- there was no year 0, nor is there 0th month or a 0th day in the month.
Yeah Toast
Unfortunately, world peace has never been attainable. Ask History.
I was born in Israel and lived there all my life till 2006. Ironically, it was often the efforts towards peace that escalated violence: The 1992 Oslo Accords were followed by the suicide bus bombings of the 90s, the 2000 Camp David summit resulted in the suicide cafe/mall/club/etc bombings of the early 00s, the withdrawal from Gaza facilitated Hamas' rise to power and so on.

All this isn't to turn this to a yet another online Mid East flame war, nor to claim that Israel doesn't share the blame for what's happening or that Palestinians aren't suffering at least as badly - just to note that anyone from a conflict area will tell you life are much more complicated than "a little more effort towards peace" ;)
Note that it was 80 grams of _powder_, not liquid.
Said like a true C programmer.
Missed that- damn. So much for futuristic magic screens being coupled with a futuristic magic device.
Two equal size screens is not Apple though. They are all about simplicity and being directly obvious. They've even managed to work it so their laptops just have one big surface for a trackpad. They never even released a mouse that had two physical buttons.
It turned out the content we were generating for search marketing: very valuable in the product as well. Wouldn't have thought about it, except that we had the content staring us in the face. You have to start doing stuff to get the better ideas.
Yes, my mistake. When in doubt, do what is correct rather than what I say. My typewriter homekey bindings have been wrecked by Vim use.
Seeking Profit in Open-Source Search Software
The good news for our side, is that these people have to be simultaneously stupid enough to blow themselves up, yet bright enough to make it through security. This is why El Al's approach to security (personal interviews with all passengers) is effective - you'd have to be close to genius level to get through their screening without triggering a (real-world, not TSA-Pansy) pat-down and luggage check - at which point, if you were that bright, you probably wouldn't be volunteering for kaboom duty.
Still a small niche.
Your comment is completely irrelevant. Did you even read the article? "Israelification" is being presented as a goal, not as a criticism.
Do we really need any quoting convention? Will I accidentally execute you if I type tptacek instead of 'tptacek? :)
My main enemy is some random person in the airport stealing my laptop bag. My theoretical enemy is the government.

Neither of these adversaries can afford a technical attack. The guy at the airport will say "oh well", format the disk, and eBay it. The government will try to convince me that I do know the key, will fail, and will have to support its (theoretical, of course) case against me with actual evidence instead.

There is one thing I just thought of, though; the SMART log shows how much activity the disk has experienced. It should be easy to check this log to see which disk I use the most. I will come up with some way to plug this leak :)

But anyway, I am not sure this would "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that I know the key. If any case against me ever depended on me decrypting my disk, I would first refuse. Then, theoretically, a charge of obstruction of justice would be filed against me, and the government would have to prove that before they could even consider their original case. (And that's no cakewalk, as there is case law saying I don't have to give up the password, and I don't think SMART data has ever been used in court.)

So anyway, I think my system is good enough. I don't have any friends in the government feeding me classified information, anyway :( So, it's likely that I will never get to test my system. But I hope the "Real Criminals" read this and perhaps use this information to help themselves stay safe from their oppressive regime.
From the website of Awwthor LLC: "In our model portfolio, our initial balance of $5,000 grew within three months to $150,000." -- So let me get that straight, a 3000% increase in only 3 months!?
Maybe it's just that Blaze's stuff seems falsifiable, and Schneier's stuff is slippery and abstract. At least we can argue rationally about the three-ounce rule. But if you accept Schneier's argument, there's no incremental discussion to be had.

Even if I agree with that (I do more than I don't), it's not productive. Regardless of whether "it's time for the TSA to go" (+34 yesterday last time I checked), the TSA isn't going anywhere. Shut up?
Until you look at anything other than PCs. I'm reasonably sure there are more ARM chips in operation than x86, and ARM is (if I recollect correctly) a RISC processor.
Oh, how did I forget /classic? I'd have had less cause for my recent caterwaulin' (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021414)