skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These days there's no reason why people should be pirating Microsoft software anyway, since free software is much better. This applies especially to non-profit organizations or charities, where spending money on software licenses is wasteful of scarce financial resources.

Probably the best strategy for charities and non-profits in this situation is:

a) Encrypt your data. In Linux systems like Ubuntu it's really easy to encrypt your home directory or create an encrypted disk. You don't have to be an expert.

b) Back up your data in "the cloud" or on servers located outside of your country. This makes it harder (but I assume not impossible) for data to be seized arbitrarily.

c) Do as much as possible out in the open anyway (published somewhere on the web) so that there is little or no "secret sauce" to be seized, except perhaps private emails. For charities being as transparent about your operations as possible makes good sense in terms of reassuring donors that their money is being well spent.
At the time I was going to sleep at 4AM every day and waking up at around 1PM or later.

That day I awoke up 5-10 minutes before CNN broadcast the news of the first plane hitting. This still freaks me out just a little, since I never woke up this early.

I only switched on CNN to bore myself back to sleep. I sat up in bed when they announced that the first plane hit. I remember them speculating about whether the plane was a passenger jet or a small plane. I didn't leave the TV for the next 12+ hours.
I know building useful things is hard and I know it takes time. But I really don't know why that means I automatically have limited effective potential by factor X. It's as if your trying to intimidate me, and I don't know if you're smug or have a big ego or are being honestly truthful, or all the above. You already know I'm new to Java, why do you feel the need express the overwhelming complexities and difficulties in building software?

Maybe because of that one line, you assumed I was an idiot (only partially true!). Maybe its because you don't know I work in an MVC framework building web pages everyday, or that I admin our servers through SSH. Or that I've built MySQL tables, PHP contact forms, and even used PayPal's API once to forward customers to a download page where they could retrieve the product they paid for.

So yeah, you're pretty damned discouraging. That's how I feel unfortunately when I read some of these comments on HN.
That book looks awesome, will definitely look into it.

On the plus side, I'm in the market for an Android phone, and it would be perfect to be able to hack things onto it right away.
I've found kernel and embedded programming to be the most difficult, particularly when there are big-endian/little-endian issues. Porting Linux to a new SBC is challenging, as is writing the board support package for it. Also fun is having to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of a CPU that some dingbat hardware engineer decided to use because it was cheap.

Prestige depends on how many people will die if you make a mistake. I've done medical equipment and air traffic control software. The sensible companies require at least twenty years experience before they'll even let you touch the code.
I briefly tried this too, data mining thousands of high-paying keywords and looking for available exact match domains, so I didn't even have to worry about SEO to get to #1.

I still couldn't make this profitable, even to cover domain/hosting costs, much less my own time put into the project.

But you or I are not Demand Media, and that's why we're not making the big bucks. The fact remains that they are INCREDIBLY good at acquiring and monetizing low-quality traffic.

This has less to do with their SEO skills and more with the fact that, for example, they can produce content that will hit the Digg front page 80% of the time.
(I'm still confused - what are the good all-disk encryption options for OS X, please?)

Thanks
It would be interesting to learn what they did to get to the front page of CNN. Excellent PR firm? Techcrunch/YC coverage? Or just hard work and ingenuity by the founders?
I'm weighing up going down this route - what kind of performance hit do you experience form using PGP WDE on your Mac? Thanks
Seems like decent enough advice, but I can't help feel that there are going to be plenty of examples of when this fails. Anyone got any?
I don't think trying to learn Java is epic at all. Perhaps you misinterpreted my blog or took it for more than face value.

I'm learning Java because I want to learn how to code. I'm not going to continue to completely rely on others to build things for me.
TL;DR

They used a telomerase activator to improve the immune system of CMV and HIV positive individuals. It worked.

"Chronic viral infections such as cytomegalovirus (CMV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) accelerate telomere loss and premature aging of the immune system, especially the virus-specific cytotoxic T cells31–36 responsible for killing infected cells."
I use truecrypt for my Mac and Windows machine and share the truecrypt file via Dropbox. Can't live without it anylonger ;-)
I tend to solve the problem of showing the same state to all users with the CouchDB _changes feed. It fits the groupware problem like a glove. Here's just one example app:

http://couchapp.org/focus/_design/focus/index.html
I sent them an email asking about this. I am in a similar situation, but with my actual bank account. I can use the service but I can't go down to the transaction level without getting the payment prompt. I think they should give the first 30 days enterprise level free, then you can pay if you like it.
Thanks for that; I'm a complete Quicksilver addict also and hadn't thought to look for an update recently as I thought development had stagnated. I'd been using β56 (3823).
yes not instant and also if it can filter just creative commons. Don't want to get into trouble with copywrite.
At a quick glimpse at the framework code, I found several no gos for me:
1) First file i opened contained Methods with > 600 lines of code with mixed variable naming (camelcase and underscore). I don't want to debug that stuff, if I run into a framework bug.
2) Several classes/interfaces in a single file. What if I ie want to write my own adapters by using the given interfaces?

On the other side the code is very well commented (not all but most of it), which is a very huge plus.
Yeah, this. How do you manage to get that kind of coverage?
There's a "securely erase free space" feature in Disk Utility, which does crash on me when I use it though, making a reboot necessary. Otherwise, you might simply use a one-liner like

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/free_space_eater; rm /tmp/free_space_eater

This overwrites all unused space on the disk with zeroes.
You'll temporarily run out of free diskspace with either option, so it's a good idea to do this when you're not working on your computer.
I'd use Bitlocker for your Windows 7 laptop, as a previous commenter noted it has a mode to work via a USB key inserted at boot time. In my experience it's been fast and unobtrusive. I've never used TrueCrypt, though I've looked into it several times and remembered thinking that it looked just as good (or better) technically as Bitlocker, but the UI is really horrid and overly complicated if you're looking for something that's a "no-brainer": http://www.truecrypt.org/screenshots

Bitlocker Tips:

1. You might have to enable it in your group policy (see http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4681-bitlocker-drive-en...) for the option to use a USB key to show up.

2. You'll need the USB key inserted to power on the laptop or resume from hibernate, but not for waking it from sleep. That helps with convenience since you won't have to use the key to unlock it from sleep.

3. Make sure to back up the Bitlocker Recovery Key saved to the USB drive. It's saved as a hidden file, just put it somewhere safe online in case you lose the USB key.

4. Don't lose the USB key along with your laptop! Since that sort of defeats the point of encrypting the drive in the first place...
I'll use the rather clichéd chess analogy: Learning the rules of chess is easy, you can do it quickly. Actually learning to play the game well takes a lot of effort, time and practice. Learning the rules of a language is easy, actually learning to program is hard and takes time.

I think any sufficiently intelligent and motivated person can learn to code at least at a modest level. Just remember that its going to be slow, frustrating and painful. Be sure not to be caught off guard. A frustrating problem that comes at you all of a sudden, can dry your enthusiasm really fast, be sure not to let that stop you. You are supposed to feel pain and frustration, you're brain would rather watch bad TV, or browse reddit or something. Just like when you exercise your muscles ache, because they'd rather you lie on your couch with a bag of chips and a can of soda. Pain is good, it means you are learning.
Ask HN: "a piece of code you're proud of" - what does it mean?
I'm looking for a job, and sometimes during the application process, companies ask you to copy+paste a piece of code you're really proud of. I can only imagine they want something incredibly mind-blowing, like the Fast Inverse Square-Root [1].

But I don't have such code. I've been programming for years, and there's no singular piece of a couple of lines that stands out. It's mostly boring, readable, well designed code that is maintainable. There's nothing sexy about that.

Sure, I'm proud of some large pieces of code. Thousands of lines that span an MVC architecture and three different platforms, for example. But the interviewer can't possible take the time to read it all and understand why I'm proud of it.

Should I whip up something incredibly complex, using the most esoteric syntax elements possible for optimal premature optimization, a nightmare to maintain, just to appease interviewers in this situation? What do you do HN?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code
Does a TrueCrypted home directory get backed up by Time Machine? That's my biggest woe about FileVault - your home dir only gets backed up when you're logged out.
Also, have you been able to run TrueCrypt as a non-admin user?
Ok, thanks for getting back on that one, I have enough offers by now that I think that the Jeep will go to a good home.

Say hi to the steamclock from me :)

j
Thanks for both tips. I didn't even think it could be built in! Mac OS kind of amazes me on a regular basis.
There is a company in Russia that sells "legalization packs" for OpenOffice which include a printed license for OpenOffice, a tech support certificate, stickers for PC, and accounting papers, so that companies have something to show to authorities.
Thanks for posting this. Fb belongs with jwz, linus and the other household names for ffmpeg and qemu alone.
Also, telomeres are largely an anti-cancer defence mechanism, like a surprisingly large number of other things that your cells do all day. When a person 'gets cancer', this just means that one of the many, many potential cancers they've had, slipped through all the defences and got out of hand.

At a cellular level, the opposite of ageing isn't longevity, it's cancer.
How to run a great unconference session
boo.com.

(Edit: for those too young to remember: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com)
For those of you don't know what an UnConference is, here's a wiki explanation:

"An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered on a theme or purpose. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations. For example, in 2006, CNNMoney applied the term to diverse events including BarCamp, Bloggercon, and Mashup Camp."

It's a great event to discover ideas outside of your usual social life. For example, At one UnConference a girl shared about her experience swimming across the English Channel, a guy brought in a 3D printer and showed how to print 3D objects, and I even learned how to juggle in one of the sessions!
My personal experience -- I did this 1.5 years ago.

First of all, you'll have a harder time getting a visa should you ever wish to relocate to a different country.

That aside, it depends on the type of person you are. If you're the kind of person that has no problem learning stuff on your own then it could work. This really includes some of the core CS stuff such as having a good grasp of algorithms, math, etc. Depending on the area you want to move in you'll have to learn some more specific stuff as well. Consumer web .. learn how to deal with scaling; Game development .. learn 3D oriented math. I'd say having a solid grasp of the execution speed of algorithms is something important regardless of the domain you're in. It will serve you a long way.

It is not so much what you know as what you can do. Can you read a paper on some technical subject and then implement it? That sounds like something an employer is interested in.

You should probably be more interested in working in smaller companies, since they're more likely to hire talented individuals. Most big corporations are built so that they can easily replace people should it be needed, smaller companies not so much.

A tip for the job hunt: Get a programming portfolio. Since you don't have a degree you'll have to show your skills, but that's no problem! Put your best work on it. :)

Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
We use Jetico Bestcrypt VE. It's extremely secure and flexible.

http://www.jetico.com/encryption-bestcrypt-volume-encryption...

You do not require a TPM chip to use BitLocker, although it's better if you have one as the TPM makes it very difficult to tamper the boot code.

Use full volume encryption products (like BitLocker or Bestcrypt VE). There's always useful data in temporary files and it protects against leaving a sensitive file out of an encrypted volume.
Just to be clear: I didn't say online trumps university.
I don't encrypt a bit — I even got no login password. I've got all my stuff on a 50GB Dropbox, so if I lose my MBP I'll just sync a new machine. Don't have anything of particular importance on my drive: design PSDs (could be secret), stock resources (icon packs, graphical elements), my music and a inspirational folder.
"The devil is in the details", they say, have you ever coded something that by changing just one line it improved the performance of an entire system?

The interview question is designed to see whether you are the type of person that has lots of initiative, and would always walk the extra mile to improve an existing system, I suppose
As clever as you think you might be, people like Fabrice remind you that there is always someone out there to outsmart you.
Ohhh wow, and this all comes from a guy who has these banners on it's blog:

"Tour de Flex", "We love freedom(Adobe)", "Flash community"

The problem is that this moron simply states that all flash issues were fixed which is no more than a damn lie from a zealot who wants to promote his platform.
For me, Fabrice remains the author of LZEXE [1], a tool that I found technically amazing at the time, very useful to meet the "64kb intro limit" back in those days.

[1] http://bellard.org/lzexe.html
A personal hero for me as well. In addition to the projects listed in the wikipedia article, I'd like to mention TinyGL (http://bellard.org/TinyGL/), which was really useful for OpenGL on BeOS/BeBox (much faster than Mesa), and qemacs (http://bellard.org/qemacs/) for editing really large text files.
Perhaps it's just me, but how do you price this service? Or is it free?

The web-site doesn't appear to provide a potential customer with the information they need to evaluate the service. At least, not easily.
Glad you took the decision to just do it! There will be lots of road blocks and you have to be strong to overcome those difficulties.

I too took the decision to learn to code earlier this year, it was actually a re-learning process as I've coded before(about 20 years ago). Nonetheless i still had to learn the new language.

Well, six months later i can build a fairly complex web app in about a month which i think it's great for my skills.
Now I need to start doing some freelance work to pay the bills while building my personal projects.

Just don't give up when things don't seem to move. Ask questions, go to the forums, stackoverflow, etc.

Best of luck!
what is the equivalent of this is mercurial ?
i use pgp whole disk encryption on my macs and softraid encrypted disks on my openbsd laptop and backup server.
I don't see this product being recommended by accountants anytime soon. Once they implement debtors, creditors, financial reports, taxes etc, I'll have a look again.

At this point it's just a toy.
Chained null checks and the Maybe monad
I'm not sure if it's an oversight or intentional but you didn't mention Lisp, which is, for many "snobs", the language of choice.
It would be interesting to know whether amount of exercise is correlated with telomere length within the active group.
I don't agree with the above.

If we're talking about Windows, it's not "boot volume encryption" but the "C: disk encryption" that you have to worry about even if the attack scenario is data at rest. If you don't encrypt C: disk every forensic worker will trivially recover a lot of material that you'd believe was encrypted on another partition.

If we're talking about Linux where you configured /boot unencrypted and everything else encrypted, only then it's about the attack scenario that parent mentions.
> Yes, Apple has indisputably better taste -- and an impeccably controlled experience. But at their current rate of progress, they'll be playing second or third fiddle to Google in the mobile space inside a few years. It's inevitable.

I'm not sure whether the second sentence is supposed to actually contradict the first here, or if it's just a separate, orthogonal assertion (perhaps about technical quality or features)—but if Atwood is really trying to imply that you can iterate toward "tastefulness", that's simply ignorant.

There is a reason that the term "design" exists as a separate and unique idea from "implementation." By looking at your entire problem space top-down, you can see the "shape" of the space, and so head straight toward the global minima. Plopping down in one place and running really fast will just get you to the top of the nearest hill, not the tallest mountain. Google is great at hill-climbing, but I've never seen them start on a hill, realize they were stuck, climb down, and find a mountain. (Instead, Google's successful projects either start at the base of the tallest mountain—Pagerank, Gmail, Chrome, etc.—or are acquired from someone else who has already done the design stage for them—Maps, Groups, etc. It doesn't seem like Android is in either of these categories.)
9/11 attacks... worst conspiracy against Islam
Well..
Many Americans - mistakenly - think that Islam asking Muslims to kill others, and that Islam is behind 9/11 attacks...

But the truth is.. that 9/11 attacks are the worst conspiracy against Islam in the new era.. and Islam haters used it as a way to attack Muslims and Islams, and to make false campaigns, and provide false information about Islam and Muslims.

Not only that, but because of 9/11 attacks, it became much harder for Muslims to move between countries and to use airlines, and it became much harder to obtain visas for U.S. and Europe, and to travel to U.S. and Europe.

This is NOT Islam and it never been!

I hope for those victims of 9/11 to sleep in peace!
No, it's more the question of the goal of the "attacker" when you don't do the whole-drive encryption. If you have the data on the notebook that are worth a lot of money and you can imagine that somebody would be interested at that then you should encrypt the OS partition.
Ever heard about page file? It's on the OS partition, unencrypted. Temporary files? There, unencrypted. Even if the temporary files are deleted, the content of them remains on the hard disk. Unencrypted.
Information - how much is too much
I subscribe to around 15 RSS feeds and have a huge amount of stuff coming into my Google Reader everyday. While a certain amount of information is knowledge/inspiration/information/good-recreation, beyond a certain point its a huge distraction.

I am sure we all go through this. How do you draw the line?
Readability is great for reformatting most articles. It's also excellent for anyone with a visual impairment, or simply when the font is too small on a monitor. There are plug-ins that use it for firefox and chrome.
Audio from dConstruct 2010
• The Designful Company: You’re aiming for different but good, but it takes guts to aim for and will test badly as it’s unfamiliar. Sticking with the familiar will test better, but ultimately market badly.

• Boil, Simmer, Reduce: Collect ideas, play with them without pre-conceptions “Nobody will die doing this”, prune stuff back again, try and aim for simplicity.

• Information is Beautiful: There’s too much information, this needs to be pruned and presented. Don’t do circular diagrams.

• The Power & Beauty of typography: Typefaces have emotions and these should be in keeping with the overall site/copy. Much like shoes can set off or kill an outfit. This wasn’t too well received too well by a bunch of men and women attendees who appeared to be of the “what’s wrong with 1 pair of shoes and helvetica” crowd.

•The Auteur Theory of Design: Explored the idea that projects need one ultimate authority like the Film Director with Final Cut, and that person is a limiting function on the output, and can drag up or down the overall output.

• Jam Session: What Improvisation Can Teach Us About Design: Improvisation can bring about your best ideas, works best within a framework when you’re riffing off other people, and your self-inhibitions are lowered when you do it; removing that self-censorship can lead to new things.

• The Value of Ruins: An unexpected standout for me; archives are potentially amazing for the future, but as we turn off things like Geocities we’re potentially losing just as much information as previous civilisations did in fires and the like.

• Everything The Network Touches: Eons ago a cunning road network provided the ability to carry messages really quickly, and that communication gave empires advantages. Now we’re potentially building the infrastructure for this kind of stuff in the online world, with Bathroom Scales that tweet. Every time devices get more connected information becomes increasingly contextualised and ever more useful. Winner of the Most OCD-ly amazing slide Deck Animations Award – they really were lovely.

• Kerning, Orgasms & Those Goddamned Japanese Toothpicks: Nerds care about things that other people don’t. That’s fine, don’t expect them to, try and make stuff so they don’t. Never get complacent, useful feedback probably hurts. Put the “narcism of minor differences” aside to deliver
Do you work with clients ?
Frankly, I've never noticed it being there other than when I do some extremely IO expensive operations like data processing. When I do that on my MPB though, I'm just testing it. That work belongs on a server anyway if you want it to be fast.
+1 Truecrypt. However my fingers get the password wrong regularly, today for instance!
The reassurance it provides is very valuable, I have PCs laptop, netbook, ext HDD, and memory sticks all encrypted as confidential client data could be on any of them.
Prior to this I used regularly get in a funk whenever I couldn't locate a memory stick
FOSS 101: Great/hip open source projects Python/JS/Ruby
I'm an intermediate python programmer with very little JS / Ruby experience (want to learn both though)- and none with open source contributions. So far, that is.<p>Wondering if there any cool (ideally a bit faddish / trendy :) open source project people would recommend to start off my open-source contributions with. Ideally something that has the bureaucracy to review my code / give suggestions etc on how i cam improve my patches, and so i learn something in the balance!