skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always appreciated the blessing in SQLite:

Instead of a license, the SQLite source code offers a blessing:

"
May you do good and not evil

May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others

May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
"

http://www.sqlite.org/different.html
This feels like a dumb question, but my first reaction to this was wondering how the Secretary of State could be relevant to this or why she is going to make a statement? I don't see what role her words have here or how they could change anything. Can someone enlighten me?
hey, ive been playing around with an idea:

pixelsforhaiti / adsforhaiti.org

get sites to donate a small ad block that links to a donation/ways to help haiti page. obviously fully nonprofit. list all other sites/companies involved like they did with the nomoreie6 page. thoughts?
I remember a discussion on here before of why using JS crypto (different implementation) was a bad idea (in short, a mitm could give you a broken jscrypto functions which don't really encrypt).

So no, you wouldn't want to use this in place of TLS, but the authors give some decent reasons why you actually might want to do this:

One major reason is the need to encrypt data before uploading it to a server; this is useful where the server needs to store data but doesn't wish to see it in the clear. It can also be used in desktop applications written in Javascript - for example, Firefox extensions.

Can anyone think of other good reasons?
Amazon also has a donation button on their home page for Mercy Corps to help victims of the Haiti earthquake.

http://www.amazon.com/
Researcher Gets $2.9 Million to Further Develop Swarm Intelligence
Rent is also cashflow negative. If anything, it's better to be a home owner in the US; you can stop paying the mortgage and probably still live in the house for 3+ months for free (or even cashflow positive if you rent part of it out).
Either way, I'm still going to take a nap when I get home.
Incidentally, thanks for opening my eyes about that one.
You can't generalise MITM and injection attacks to "Javascript crypto is bad". There's an idea floating around called "host proof hosting" - or in the Clipperz parlance, "zero-knowledge applications" - that I think could be potentially very important in future, and that relies entirely on Javascript crypto. The only problem is that I haven't seen it done right yet - every application I've looked at that claims to implement this paradigm has some enormous, glaring shortcoming.

I'm working on an epic tldr; blog post and an associated project release related to this - keep an eye out for it next week.
BEFORE you RT that RedCross donation message or donate any cash
yourselves... please consider.

Red Cross is a giant beast of a company. It is $600,000,000 in debt. It has ridiculous overhead.

As fellow hackers... We're all trying to build startups/ideas because we think big companies are missing something... that we have a better way to do things... that we can build a better product.

If you want to help Haiti. Give directly. I spent 2 years building a
non-profit (a start-up if you will) that sets up volunteer centers in
disaster areas. We are a super lean organization with an executive director that takes a $0 per year salary.

Donations are being gathered to directly help the people in Haiti.

Donations Can Be Made Here: http://bit.ly/HODR_Haiti

Sorry to rant... but the RedCross-fest on Twitter right now is killing
me.

EDIT: I created a new post with more info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051914
Oops! You're totally right. I had just assumed it was from Haiti. Changed the title to reflect this.
The paper is worth reading: http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/#paper It reads fairly well.

Interesting how they built their CSPRNG, using mouse movements gathered as the user interacts with a page (and optionally cookie data):

Since we extract 2 bits of entropy per mouse move sample,
we need 128 samples to generate a 256-bit AES key. Our data
shows the that median time for the generator to be seeded
to the default level of 128 samples is 9, 28 and 41 seconds
on the survey, forum and blog, respectively.

I wonder if there's a good way to buffer the entropy securely so it doesn't have to wait so long for every encryption.
"If you think ... think again."

Why do so many journalists write in such cliched ways?
We're successful because our moms send us lots of zaatar for the morning of a big pitch :).
The thinking is, if you can afford food, the Internet, rent, BOOKS, MOVIES, etc. then you most certainly can afford to pay for a subscription or for one article.

Myself, I'm not going to pay for the Wall Street Journal but I will pay for The Economist and other news magazines/journals. So I'll be waiting till they have the story.
Thanks for your work, I despise the Red Cross.
By what criteria should one decide the boundaries and rulers of a nation? If someone with lots of guns takes over the state of Texas right now and declares that he can do anything he wants due to national sovereignty, will you respect that claim?
Ask HN: Do all techies have a huge list of pet projects?
It biases you in a way which is completely unnecessary

If you aren't comfortable asking direct questions and need to go with a guy who got fired, you shouldn't be in a management position to begin with.

If you can't take in multiple opinions and judge the worth of them, then you definitely shouldn't be in any position where you have to interact with people or technology. You also shouldn't be allowed on the Internet, lest you hurt yourself or others with horrible advice.

Your advice here is just so wrong that I can't even reasonably see a way for this to be a devil's advocate kind of position. Ignoring available data before you know which data sources are accurate is foolish. The guy resigned or got fired or whatever; OP only knows the non-technical hiring interviewer's side of the story (and that's filtered through CYA). We don't know that the former IT guy is bitter in ways that would make him an unreliable source of information, you're just assuming he is. We don't know that the hiring interviewer understood anything the former IT guys said, ever, about anything, including why he was dissatisfied; you're just assuming he does.

I don't care anything about the politics and crap that other folks seem to want to bring up. A new IT guy needs to communicate with the old one in order to do a good job. It's not optional. The reason the old IT guy is available to talk is, I assume, because he believes in that professional courtesy even if he doesn't think much of his former employer. I have never left an IT gig without at least a day of knowledge transfer, and any IT guy that would is not fit to do the job.

Have you ever worked in an IT position? Arguing against talking to the old IT guy is like arguing against washing hands. Best practices like these should not be mocked or made light of.
Asteroid 1950 DA
In a nutshell, that's almost what the Fortuna family of PRNGs do. In the JSCrypto implementation, entropy is collected from the mouse movements continuously, and like all Fortuna implementations it uses a clever dance using a block cypher and multiple entropy pools is to "buffer" the entropy. Google "fortuna" for more information.
"Using the sun cannot be plan A, because as far as I've heard, solar panels barely output enough energy to pay back the energy it takes to make them."

This was true 20 years ago, but now it's closer to 1% than 100% (and as that happens the cost per watt has gone down from $50 to $1 and below), though I don't have the direct reference on hand. But I think it's cited in this presentation (http://khoslaventures.com/presentations/Google-4-22-09.ppt) or this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euXfy9c3Vuw&feature=chann...)
I meant no disrespect here - as I mentioned beans and rice are enjoyed world-wide, in all manner of different styles. I count a few varieties among my favorite food combinations. Thanks for sharing.
Done! http://github.com/Scriptor/pharen/tree/master/pastebin/

Note that html.phn, which contains a few simple html-element functions, should be compiled before the pastebin works.
Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data
Kodu Game Lab from Microsoft Research (http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/kodu/default.a...) is a really good way to get kids into programming. Disclosure: I worked on it.
Inequity of access. Too many kids today don't have access to computers, cell phones, video games or other programmable devices.

"today" kids have greater access to technology than any time in history, including yesterday. Including 5 minutes ago.
No.

Some of us have interesting resumes.
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Sure - I should have prefaced that with some.

I've seen a couple of Hyper-V installations, but I'm pretty sure I haven't seen one running linux clients (despite the code MS put into the kernel). I'm sure they exist - but for now Hyper-V is just a pure-MS play (and still behind VMWare at that).

Don't forget - MS really take a few iterations before their products begin to shine. The X360 (barring H/W issues) is a really nice piece of kit, Office took a few versions but by 5/6 was really pretty good. Windows 3.1 was when Windows started to work (although really you could declare that at a major release later 95). And XP SP2 And Vista SP2 (aka Win7) were when the OS really started to shine. Bottom line - Don't count MS out when they really put their mind to something.
Scientists crack code, raising the bar for digital security
Most of today's kids, yes. Not all of them. Lots and lots of low-income families don't have access to these things, and it's naive to think otherwise.
A lot do. A quick look at my "projects" folder shows 12 different projects. My snippets and quickies and tests folders have hundreds of files. Various accounts at github, googlecode, etc contain more projects publicly available. The src folders of various machines contain projects for work, or OSS projects with code I've modified for experimenting. This is the result of many years of coding, prolly the last 15 or so. It should be noted that almost all of them are in some state of abandonment. All of them are incomplete. Most don't even work to their intended purpose, they just exist as attempts to understand various concepts.

I do not consider myself atypical in this. Most coders I know, at least those who are passionate about their work, are similar. No matter where you stand on the "hackers and painters" thing, it should be acknowledged that in this respect both are similar. Most painters have hundreds of test canvasses lying around, with stuff that will never be seen by the world -- it is how they hone thier skills.

I think "nerd-dom" in general has lots of people like this. The arduino crowd all have lots of toys. The steampunk kids are the same. Looking over to the nerdier bits of shop class is not much different -- seems like everyone makes a paintball tank these days (and to get to that level usually is by route of a shop full of failed experiments, potato cannons, a home-made scooter, and so on)
Might want to check out:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libgw32c.htm

Or the FreeBSD source:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/gen/erand...
I was curious about how this service works, mostly to know where the money is actually flowing. I Googled for awhile and came up with nothing, but thanks to randomwalker's post in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051844), I was able to dig up some info. I summarized what I found here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/aoyin/text_haiti_t...

It's not definitive, but hopefully it'll help people make a more informed judgement about using this short code for donations.

p.s. this charity was mentioned on Reddit:

http://www.pih.org/home.html

I'd never heard of it, but the founder, Paul Farmer, has a long history of working in and for Haiti.
When dealing with contracts I've often reflected on the parallels between lawyers and programmers. Both attempt to craft their writing such that it's interpreted the intended way. Both try to anticipate changing environmental conditions and account for them. Both find their argot inscrutable to outsiders. And both can be torpedoed by a missing comma.
A category which Bingo Card Creator fits into pretty handily.
We can always go back to the old way of distributing software
Are you saying if you have lots of pet projects you don't do any real work ???
I believe that another problem with non-native crypto implementations is that they are more vulnerable to timing attacks, because you have less control over what the computer is actually doing.

Note: I am not a cryptographer, and I don't even play one on TV.
I wrote more info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051914*
I think s/he was trying to say that some people completely devote themselves to their work instead of side projects.
erand48 returns random doubles from [0.0, 1.0). The argument to erand48() is just a state vector (instead of the usual unsafe convention of having the RNG store its state internally). You can replace it with a call to any other equivalent random number generator.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/eran...
There are many lurkers living vicariously. :)
I'm curious about what short codes can carry extra charges like this. For regular phones, people are generally aware that 900 numbers are toll lines and you'll be charged for that, but for these text numbers I don't know what the rule is.

Seems like there's a lot of potential for scammers to tell people to text a certain number without telling people that charges would apply. At the student newspaper I used to work for, we told people to text "follow name" to 40404 (Twitter's short code) to get text message updates with news.
I suppose I should clarify: I don't maintain a list of mostly abandoned or "prototype" code. It'd get something new every few days. I also don't publish a lot of blog posts or open-source software. Instead, I try to find interesting clients, take on interesting projects at work, or experiment with new methodology there.. and maintain my "trophy case" on my resume. Does ~/scratchpad contain a crap-ton of half-baked or throw-away code? Sure, but I'm not about to spend time making a list or putting it on the internet.
...prolly...

I had to look that up: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=prolly
Another option might be the IRC: International Rescue Committee, at http://www.theirc.org/

You can donate all of $5 in a similar manner by doing this: text 253-83 with the message 'haiti'. They'll send you more info and a confirmation request before you are billed the five bucks.

Friend of a worker there recommended it. I can't vouch for the organization and how they work, and agree with the parent post about overhead, but why not throw 5 dollars into an unknown, in a situation in a country that deserves so much better?
Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?
That's perfectly fine thinking if it's something you found yourself. However, implicit in linking something on a social link aggregator is a sort of "here, read this, it's good" on the part of the poster, which just doesn't jive with the site asking for a fee. It's like bringing donuts for your friends, opening the box and telling them you got each person their favorite, and then charging for them—it's just not how our particular social machinery works.
Offtopic: everytime I land on startuplessonslearned.com I get an IE Operation Aborted dialog and an error page. This has occured every time for at least 6 months. Shame, I really want to read the articles. Browser: IE 7.0.5730.13 on XP Pro. (Work PC so no control over the setup)
This, and I don't consider exploratory throw-away code a "pet project" (probably because most of those explorations are evaluating techniques for work.)

Further, if I am interested in doing X then I find a way to do that professionally.
There are few people without access to the libraries with computers. (edit: in the U.S.)
I sympathize with your frustration with the American Red Cross, but please pay attention when posting financial information. The statement "It is $600,000,000 in debt" is incorrect.

The American Red Cross has $613MM in debt. But it also has $3.5BB in assets. In addition to the aforementioned debt, there are $1.2BB in additional liabilities, for total net assets of:

$1,672,466,000

Source: KPMG consolidated financial statement, June 30 2009.

http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/corppubs/FY0...

There is an enormous difference between having debt and being in debt.
This is sort of an aside, but I will never describe my software as shareware within earshot of a customer. (I sometimes use the word as a shortcut for "I sell B2C software over the Internet" around other developers.)

I think shareware is an outmoded name, an outmoded distribution model, and has connotations that I do not want for my business. Everyone selling software as a product has a "try before you buy" option these days. You can download an evaluation version of Microsoft Office. In that respect, shareware has conquered its rude conquerors.

But do I really want my customers sharing my software? No. I have a website, it is the authoritative place for it. I don't depend on viral distribution of my software, like classical shareware distributors did many many years ago when passing copies of executables to your friends was likely to result in a good user experience.

My customers (largely non-technical folks) may not understand what shareware means and, to the extent they have any impression of the word, it is probably negative. For example, they might think it is "software I don't have to pay for" or "cruddy software which is going to give my Google a virus." I don't want my customers thinking they don't have to pay for my cruddy software which is going to give their Google a virus. I want them thinking "I have a problem and paying Patrick is the fastest way to solve it." Branding myself as shareware does not get me any closer to that objective.
I agree with some of your criticisms of the Red Cross, however given that rapid response is necessary and this is time sensitive, can you actually use the money to deploy and ramp up in a short enough time to make the donation meaningful to the current crisis?

I support your aims, but the ability to move quickly is essential and it's unclear whether your organization is likely to bring support faster or slower. Could you elaborate?
Interesting. I would say that the tools, concepts, techniques, solutions, etc that I learnt whilst working on my side projects improved the quality of my "work" by orders of magnitude and have been invaluable to my career.

In fact with some teams I have worked with, if we interviewed a tech person who did not have any side projects we often viewed them with suspicion.
Could you please elaborate? I'm sure a lot of hackers who give to the RedCross would be interested to understand your reasons so that they can make better decisions about donating to relief funds in the future.
Infrastructure is expensive. It also enables acting on large scales immediately. I have no problem with the idea that money donated to the Red Cross may not go "directly" to the victims of the latest tragedy. Without the money for administrative and infrastructure costs, they would be unable to do what they do.

I think your startup is both good and noble. But I suspect that being a "beast of a company" and having large infrastructure costs is the price we have to pay for an organization to be able to respond immediately to humanitarian crisis on a global scale.
> In 2005, Californians paid out $35.9 billion and received back $31.2 billion. That's a gap of $4.7 billion. That's a lot.

Actually, it's more, and it doesn't matter.

CA elects "progressive legislators" who push the programs that do such transfers. Do you really want to argue that it's okay to do that on the state level but not on the national level?
Be careful. You may be next.
Too many to list here. I should probably start a project to enumerate my projects.
Personally, I keep a running list of ideas (I have about 50), but I try to stay focused on one project only, or two depending on how many cofounders and my level of involvement with each. Trying to actually push to market and think you will hav success by managing 100 working concepts is just crazy. Don't do it.
Edit: Sorry. I deleted my comment. I thought you were being redundant and hadn't read the article. I didn't notice that you were the author. can someone vote this comment's parent up?
Red Cross CEO earns $565,000 in salary.

What's interesting is that this is higher than the CEO cap the Obama administration placed on for-profit companies which received bailout money.

The Red Cross received $100 million in bailout money.

http://blog.charitynavigator.org/2009/02/non-profit-ceo-pay-...

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...
You seem to be opposing open source software to "interesting work" -- which in some feilds such an opposition holds truth. In others all the interesting work is open source.

As for the post -- the question asked if everyone had a such a large list of pet projects. Your answer seems to be yes too. Sure you dont publish it, but you try to do new projects and methods at work -- pet projects are pet projects, whether at work or home.

Also, keeping around "throwaway" code has helped me more than not -- I can find some half remembered example and be using the concept way quicker than trying to come up with it again.
So what is the money paying for if 0% of it is being used for overhead/administration costs? Or rather, who pays for this organization to operate?

I support this idea, but that just seems like a strange claim when trying to contrast yourselves with the Red Cross as a general aid organization.

Please do give money to help people recover from this earthquake and other disasters.
It's worth noting that the Red Cross generally ranks highly when it comes to efficiency (i.e., low overhead):

http://www.charitywatch.org/toprated.html#humanserv

Of course, this has a lot to do with economies of scale, and "low overhead" does not immediately imply "high impact per dollar."
Is the disparity between the two really large? What percentage of prisoners would they need to release and how much would class sizes have to rise to balance the budget?

I am sure the disparity is small compared to the federal equivalent.
I have found it is easier to do it the other way -- I'm interested in X. I'll start doing it. Money will follow. And more interesting job offers.
How can that possibly be a discussion-enhancing comment on a news site lovingly called "Hacker News"?

Please mind that signal to noise ratio is something that we have to all work hard to maintain.
I've got quite a few: http://github.com/dustin (I've also got unpublished projects and projects not published on github).

I've met people who don't have such things and are still competent, but not terribly commonly.