skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a developer and cyclist, I really like your idea and implementation. It's modern and intuitive, something a lot of cycling sites lack, unfortunately.

One feature you can think about that I've often thought would be useful, would be to track road quality via a device that detects vibrations. Poorly maintained roads = big vibrations. I don't know the technical feasibility of this off hand, but hopefully it gives you a new avenue to explore.
Fiesta Bowl Game Live Stream Boise State Broncos vs TCU Horned Frogs Game Online
Microsoft generally are "working on this too" - they're a big company, and spend a lot on research. Hot research topics aren't that hard to spot. Whether it comes to delivering anything commercially is a different matter.
Make No Little Plans – Defining the Scalable Startup
I've refined the program so that it isn't so much of an offense against all that is good and holy in programming practices. It is now only an offense against most programming practices. (cough Millions of executions of eval. cough 14 levels of nested for loops.)

The comments now explain what it is actually doing.

http://pastie.org/765992

The new and improved version of the program generates solutions for upwards of 2080 of the years between 0 and 2100, including everything from the last century except 1911.

It is also disgustingly parallel, and would make a good case study if you want to try your hand at a Map/Reduce or similar distributed approach. (That is the only feasible way to brute force this problem if you go up to 5 or 6 operators, unless you have a supercomputer handy. Even with only 4 operators it pegs JRuby for upwards of five minutes on my laptop, and the complexity is bounded by n^n where n is the number of operators.)
This appears to be timeable. Rack and Rails just fixed a similar bug. Over LANs, attackers can figure out the correct MAC for any message.

Also, what the heck is a "salt" on an HMAC-SHA1 signature? If you lose the secret key, you've lost the verifier. You shouldn't be using HMAC signatures in so many places that keying them individually is a problem.
I made a Processing hack based on distributing the color space over the Hilbert curve.

http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=2178

My wife liked it so much she made a quilt based on it

http://www.flickr.com/photos/abulafia/2896382435/sizes/o/
How old does an article have to be before we can stop calling it "news"? And the corollary: Is there any theoretical limit to the number of times it can it appear on Hacker News before it starts looking a little stale?
Yes. Did the article suggest otherwise?
I was interested to see that the simple Mysql reads in the benchmark are slightly faster than the Berkeley DB ones. Has Oracle broken Berkeley DB that badly or is Mysql particularly fast?
Editorializing the headline, no thank you. "Microsoft Courier tablet designs leaked" or the original "Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet" would have been better.

From the guidelines:

You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.
I have a close friend who studied Economics. He always said he wasn't cheap, just "opportunity cost aware."
only 3 months later? I'd give it at least another 3 with no news before calling it "an abandoned line of research".
Scheme->JavaScript isn't that easy, because of tail calls. But Jss handles it.
The Secret to Great HR
Mentioning the Newton makes me think of how Microsoft still seems obsessed with handwriting/pen interfaces. This may be a generational thing. There seems to be an assumption that the average person finds writing with a pen the most natural way to record information. But I bet there are a lot of us now who spend more time typing on a keyboard than writing with a pen. I found myself surprised, for example, when the user hand-wrote a URL in the browser app to go to a page. Hand-writing a URL is a pretty foreign experience, except in those rare cases when I need to remember a URL and I'm away from a computer (and I can't remember the last time I actually did that).

Your comment also got me Googling for the Simpson's clip that was pretty much the Newton's tombstone. But I found the video introducing the Newton at the bottom of this page more interesting:

http://technabob.com/blog/2007/07/20/classic-apple-moment-ne...

One interesting thing is that it is clear that the Newton was struggling to find a way to move data around before the dawn of the world wide web. You can print! Or fax! At least, you can the next time you are physically next to a device. Or you can "beam" something who happens to be in close proximity. Er, if they also have a Newton.

The fact that literally half of the intro video is devoted to getting the handwriting recognition to work correctly, though, is certainly ominous. It indicates that the hand-writing interface was not as intuitive as they had hoped.

Which brings us back to Microsoft and pens. I wonder if the vision for tablet computing was born out of Gates and his generation's familiarity with hand writing and inherently assuming that the average person is more comfortable with it than keyboards, and not updating those assumptions for the current generation who spend far more time updating their Facebook status on a keyboard than taking notes in class (assuming they don't use a laptop for that, too).
I flagged this and you should too.

(1) It contains no meaningful content; any other story posted here about the GSM A5/1 attack has 100% more content.

(2) It was posted by a sockpuppet account that neither comments nor submits anything other than "IT World" stories, which the sockpuppet itself clearly has not written.

Enough already.
I don't disagree with the post but I think this kind of discussion is largely pointless. The media loves to say "That is dead" because it makes a good headline. But it doesn't mean anything.

An example: how many years has it been since people declared the PDA dead at the hands of the smartphone? Yet all these years later there are still PDAs for sale (http://tinyurl.com/ydeufwh)

Netbooks has a future as long as there's a reasonable market for people who don't want to pay a monthly fee for a smartbook (and I think that will be a long, long time). They may be overtaken in sales but I don't know if that really matters to those who want a netbook as long as they can still get one.
@samlittlewood, that would be a really cool augmented reality application. just point it up at the sky to see all the various locations of airplanes.
Oh look. Another abennet IT World submission. Flagged.

The highest-scored IT World post ever submitted here got 50 points. That's an anomaly, because the vast majority of abennett's IT World submissions get only one point ever (according to searchyc). Can we just ban this source?
I suspect that at this point, a somewhat dynamically crushed sound just comes across as "right" for listeners. I'm surprised that no one has launched a study to see how listeners actually react to the crushed sound, once the apparent loudness is neutralized.
Ask the attorney: Founder vesting
Of course I meant "disaster" metaphorically. No one actually died or got injured because of ugly coats of arms and flags.

Here are some examples of antiheraldic flags and coats of arms:

* The flag of the State of Georgia http://www.50states.com/flag/gaflag.htm

* The coat of arms of a city in Easter Europe: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/hu/8/89/Zalaegerszeg_a...

* Generally any flag / coat of arms designed in the Soviet Union
Thanks - this kind of feedback is exactly why we're putting this out for review.

Can you provide pointers or a bit more information as to how the timeable issue works, and what the workaround is?

Is there a more technically correct term we should be using instead of 'salt'? And is that feature a total waste of time? Remember, we're building a framework for other developers to use - so saying "you shouldn't be using HMAC signatures in so many places that keying them individually is a problem" assumes that developers using Django (who may have no crypto / security knowledge at all) will understand that. Is this something we should cover in the documentation?
it's from last September ... nothing has been heard since (it's dead)

I'm not sure that follows. Last September isn't that long ago.
I suspect there are a few issues at play. First, with BDB I have to deserialize the entire object to get the UID - while I tell MySQL I'm only interested in 1 column. Second, with the simple query I'm literaly just traversing a b-tree - which is the exact same thing that mysql does since I told it to build an index on the relevant column (except with BDB I do so in Lisp instead of raw C).
In case you're wondering about public access to these kinds of datasets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...

According to the same Wikipedia article, the FAA is has been rolling this out since 2006 (target date of 2015 for full coverage).
Linux: #1 Operating System in Hollywood
Passur does this for a number of large US airports:

http://www.passur.com/airportmonitor-locations.htm
Predictions for 2010: Tablets will fail, Google will pummel Microsoft
You appear to have the same vulnerability as Google Keyczar had:

http://rdist.root.org/2009/05/28/timing-attack-in-google-key...

Which leads to the question: why aren't you simply using Keyczar?
Forgive my ignorance, but I never programmed much and not at all in several years, so I have been reading Learning Perl as a refresher. In what way(s) is a Key-Value database different from a hash, or set of hashes? According to the book, a hash is a set of key-value pairs. I assume the database is normally several hashes with the same keys for finding values, and the software for associating the values from multiple hashes, but is there more to it?
flightstats.com seems to have flight tracking for a particular flight. I'm not sure if this isn't just a display of "elapsed flight time vs. scheduled arrival" though.
I wasn't aware Netbooks were up for dying. I guess I'm behind the times, but I still thought they were a pretty hot thing.

I have an Asus EEE and its absolutely great. I use it as much as my desktop. Sure I don't develop or play games on it, but for sitting in front of the TV and browsing the web/answering emails, it's great.
ISlate specs "revealed." We also have a bridge to sell you.
I've been musing over some of these same ideas since reading Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts over Christmas break. He certainly makes a strong case for Javascript that it's better to become intimately acquainted with a sensible, well-designed, and mostly gotcha-free subset of the language rather than go crawling into its margins in pursuit of elegance.
It's not clear what relevance the pickup trucks have. Is he saying that a small truck would sell well (even though they presumably were discontinued for a reason), and that by analogy, small netbooks will continue to sell well?
If you're surprised by this legal requirement, see here: http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/20060127a1.asp

This was almost a pain point for me when I thought of offering rebates the first time ("Buy today and get 10% back"), since some states require unclaimed rebates to be escheated. It turns out that the service I was thinking of using (RebateDelivery) handles this nonsense for you.
By saying "X doesn't have to die" you're getting all of the sensationalism of "X is dead" but get to take the moderate stance while doing so.
I think he should stick to writing about cryptography. I read his blog from time to time because of his expertise, but recent posts has just been filled with assumptions and speculations.
Yes, but the coincidence is funny. These imaginary products always appear when some competitor is about to launch something that may threaten Microsoft's mindshare.

BTW, is Project Natal shipping?
What specific assumptions or speculation in this article do you find objectionable?
I would have phrased that as "These research projects always get surfaced when some competitor is about to launch something.." otherwise, yeah, it's about publicity and mindshare.

BTW, is Project Natal shipping?

I don't know, but they are hiring.
We try to keep Django's dependencies down to the Python standard library + a database adapter, so I'm pretty limited on which underlying crypto libraries I can use.

How big a deal is that timing attack? Would it be appropriate to ignore it by default, but provide people who are concerned about it the option to swap out the sha1 signing for something using an external library that isn't affected by it. Or even just drop an optional "time.sleep(random.random() * 0.01)" line in to the code that generates the signatures?
So you want to ban the source based on a lack of points, or just because you don't like the source?
"There seems to be an assumption that the average person finds writing with a pen the most natural way to record information."

This is a valid assumption, writing with a pen IS the most natural way for humans to record information, this includes drawing figures(how do you draw sketchs with a keyboard?).

The problem is that machines don't have a brain and find very difficult to decode pen writing, the first that solve this problem will win a lot of fans.

PS: I type very fast, but I don't like the keyboard as much as pen.
<shrug> Cramer's crystal ball is historically about a coin flip. Someone did a study and showed his "calls" are around 48% accurate.
It's a big enough deal that if I'm right (I looked at your code for about 15 seconds) and you ship it, you will look ridiculous when someone blogs the exploit code.
Forget the dumb time.sleep() idea, I just looked at the keyczar implementation of constant time string comparison. I'll roll that in to the library, thanks.
Google And Spotify Dance Over U.S. Launch
From the original wire article:

> "AT&T's prepaid calling cards must be treated as unclaimed property under district law," the attorney general's office said in a statement.

More from the wire article:

> According to the attorney general's office, that sum, known in the industry as "breakage," represents some 5 to 20 percent of the total balances purchased by consumers who use the calling cards.

It's actually an interesting bit of case law insomuch as how the law applies to modern technologies, and if it IS in fact the case that AT&T has to turn the minutes over as unclaimed, a cash-strapped operation like D.C. would be crazy to leave the money sitting on the table.
They will certainly show something (that will never ship) on CES, trying to steal some of Apple's thunder.

It's not a hard device to fake - just glue two 10-inch tablets with a fake interface and off you go. It would be good enough to show on TV.

If I were Jobs, I would not announce a tablet after CES and watch how that confuses Microsoft PR people.
You list an awful lot of features on the home page. ("Plan, share, upload, analyze." are all features. Or take a look at all of your bullet points.)

Benefits sell software, not features.

Think of it this way -- you're a cyclist, right? Supposing you were trying to convert a family member into cycling, would you say "Involves moving a pair of pedals in circles quite a bit! Spins wheels! Forward motion while cycling!" No, you say "Do this and you will be healthier, have more energy, save money on gas, and not kill the planet." (Feel free to strike the last one if you are not an environmentalist. Gaia knows I'm not. But you get the general idea.)

Figure out what your software does for your user rather than what your software does, and then sell them on buying that tangible benefit to their lives.
Perl 6 in 2009
Right, but then they quote someone saying that the video game version is better because of "digital domain compression", followed by a statement that "Digital compression is the process that allows a song to go from being a very big sound file in its natural state to a very small file in your iPod"
Did you try it before submitting? The example didn't worked the last time I tried this...
If you're in the narrow group of people that like both Federer and David Foster Wallace, you'll like Infinite Jest, which is a 1000 page DFW book about tennis, drug addiction, and garbage disposal.

Otherwise, I found this NYT essay a lot less engaging than the essays in "A Supposedly Fun Thing...". Another good one at The Atlantic (it was better in print, where they got to play with the typesetting too):

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace
Memoizing recursive functions via the fixed-point Y combinator
If I were Jobs, I would not announce a tablet after CES and watch how that confuses Microsoft PR people.

Jobs, on the other hand, probably cares more about his own business than about confusing Microsoft PR.
Based on the fact that it's being spammed here, and that the stories rarely contribute to the site.
Adobe, social networking will be top targets for hackers in 2010
Has this patch been submitted to the 2-3 stable branch for 2.3.6?
Microsoft Surface is arguably a tablet... Just a rather large one ;-)
You could make the exact same silly argument about seat belts, crumple zones, and air bags, but the fact is all 3 save many lives.
The difference is persistence provided by a "store", not the semantics of the data space (which is a mapping from keys to values). Further, a hash is one of the alternative implementation strategies for a key-value space; your typical in-memory "database" will likely opt for hashes, while issues regarding disk access latencies favor tree structures.
Why are entrepreneurs flocking to mountain towns? (2008)
I like that you present the trade-offs involved in choosing a relational DB or a key value store. Key value stores can go faster because they are lower level, like C compared to higher level programming languages. But this also means they give you fewer features, and you need to write more lines of code to get the same functionality, and if you're not careful you are more likely to have bugs or data corruption.

Most of the other things I have read on this topic have taken a position of "Relational good, Key-value bad" or the opposite. Your take is much more useful, with some back of the envelope data to back it up.
I have repeatedly had exactly the opposite experience: I've gotten hundreds of respondents for surveys, driven traffic to new blog posts, and fully enrolled a class off Twitter posts, and have had Facebook attempts at the same things fizzle. Twitter has been a much more valuable tool for us than Facebook.

Which is fine, because my Facebook list is filled with people I went to high school with, who couldn't give less of a crap about what my company is doing this week.
Anyone know the status of OWASP for Python?

Here is a link to their unimplemented encryptor.py class:

http://code.google.com/p/owasp-esapi-python/source/browse/es...
Indeed, the first result for "netbook growth" on Google is from 1st September 2009 and is titled "Report: Netbook Growth Continues Unabated". A better title might have been "Netbook form-factor here to stay" and talked more about form factors of newer possibilities (tablets) and how the "subnotebook/premium netbooks" haven't pushed down sales of the cheaper ones. But even his discussion there is lacking as he writes as if netbooks are being primarily driven by business users, which is ridiculous given I have yet to see a business user with one (although I am sure there are) compared to the tons of references to people using them on the couch and endless coffee shop and university sightings.

I firmly believe tech journalism is the lowest form of journalism and is filled with trolls as often they are writing for online publications and literally justifying themselves to editors by their inbound links. Dvorak at least has the honesty to admit on video that he deliberately trolls (mac users in that case). The rest of them proclaim they are doing "journalism" and then basically reach into their hats filled with cards with "Xs don't have to die" and "is X an X killer?" and press releases printed on them and spew out an article in 10 minutes.
Excellent points on what constitutes a "startup" as opposed to a "small business" but the approach, I think, too narrowly limits the idea of "startup" largely to the type of potentially industry-changing company that VCs will fund.

Among other distinctions that can comfortably be drawn within what I think are clearly "startup" companies are:

1. Founders who seek to make a pure technology play and sell to a larger company within a narrow window in the 7-figure range (up to $100M). The founders in this type of startup are not in it for the long haul and can potentially succeed without any form of VC funding (though they typically do not self-fund but rely on either friends/family or angels to give them needed capital). This is a bona fide startup, in my view, even though it may not scale quickly or at all by the time its technology is acquired.

2. Founders who seek to develop a new and innovative niche business that will not shake up an industry but will make for a good growth business yielding extraordinary returns (e.g., a player that succeeds in the virtualization space with a product that does not take on VMWare or the other large players but that works within the established environment to offer, e.g., low-cost, non-resource-intensive desktop virtualization solutions for the enterprise). This type of startup will tend to scale quickly but will never shake up an industry. It potentially could succeed with angel-level funding and bypass the VCs, though more likely it will need some form of VC funding. Typical exit: up to $300M via acquisition.

3. The type of industry-changing startup described by the author of this post. Typical goal here on exit: $400M and up but usually aiming at multi-B. This type of startup is invariably VC-funded and is indeed the "sweet spot" for tier-1 VC investments.

All of the above typically involve a founding team, normally small initial capital contributions by the founders themselves, a reliance on some form of technology or IP to define at least a key aspect of the business model, and an expectation of an extraordinary comparatively short-term return on the investment (typically 3-5 years).

This stands in contrast to the attributes of a typical small business, where the founders will often make more substantial initial capital contributions, will not tend to emphasize intellectual property rights, will fix their sights primarily on making immediate operating profits, and will typically have no expectation of any extraordinary return on investment in the short term (that is, will not aim for a near-term exit).

I think the above is a more useful way of distinguishing a "startup" from a "small business." That said, the post here is quite good and highlights very sharply the key attributes of what is perhaps the most important type of startup - the one that scales rapidly and seeks to conquer an industry.
Good for you, but your muscles must get a lot of work that way.
You know, there is this wonderful feature here called "reply" ...
I wouldn't ban it. However it's worth pointing out some of their other headlines:

"Learn How To Print Pages In Order with Ink Jet Printers"

"MS says you don't have to check some files for viruses. Bad idea."

Perhaps not HN material.

Edit: also have a look at abennet's submissions (all from itworld, every day):

"Migrating favorites in IE, Firefox, and Chrome"
"Essential Windows Tricks"

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=abennett

Some of the articles might be relevant to HN, but this person isn't part of the community with those silly ones and is just spamming. I wouldn't be surprised if it was automated.
Georgia homes development
Lamar Smith Signature Group: specializing in home building, commercial and land development in the Savannah Georgia area.
"Mainstream" isn't the only reason given for not using Haskell. He also says that lazy evaluation is a bad default (too costly) for games and the syntax is too complicated.
If this is established as a precedent though how far will it apply? Do ISP's have to turn unused internet bandwidth over to the government too? It doesn't seem feasible.