skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before you dive too far into full-disk encryption, you might want to contemplate the consequences of this research:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9876060-38.html

The paper referenced is available at:

http://citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf

From that paper, the most salient sentence for this discussion is:

"On all of our sample DRAMs, the decay rates were low
enough that an attacker who cut power for 60 seconds
would recover 99.9% of bits correctly."

The long and short is that your password has to be in RAM at some point in order to be matched against what is typed in. RAM decays slowly after a machine has been switched off. As the research shows, one can use a widely-available can of air to make that decay happen even slower. In the process, one can pull the value out of RAM.

Note that this is a hardware problem that no software on the market has been able to address. To do so, you would have to be able to validate x against y without having the value of y ever enter RAM.

Consequently, a reasonably good tech thief can read the password out of RAM. For the not-so-good tech thief, using passwords and social engineering tricks like being nice to someone and then asking them to watch your stuff for a moment will probably do the trick. I tend to see the various implementations of full-disk encryption as more for peace of mind and mitigation of liability than real security.
If it really makes a wide range of other things obsolete, shopping it around may be a very bad idea. Are these folks (google, microsoft, etc) the ones who will likely be obsolete almost overnight? If so, shopping it around may not get you any buyers and, instead, may make you a target of attempts to stop you by some means or other. (As I understand it, Microsoft has a long history of buying up new stuff that seems interesting and then never launching a product. They also supposedly set their sights on destroying Netscape when they wouldn't sell. Netscape did, in fact, go out of business.)
It's OK to iterate fast if there are few/no dependencies on the platform and the cost of upgrading is low. e.g. the high-end 3D gaming market is essentially dead as a business because consumers eventually got wiser about today's top-of-the-line 3D card becoming commodity chips 6 months down the road.
If you can find it, there's an excellent book on the Boo story; boo hoo http://www.amazon.co.uk/Boo-Hoo-Dot-Com-Story/dp/0099418371
The government changed the law to allow previously private information to be used for new purposes. They could do this again.

The only way you can prevent the government from misusing information is not to give it to them.
I believe one very important reason is: don't put your data on another network unless you really need it, because it always comes at a cost.

For instance that is part of the french navy policy (separate networks). You find it funny, until it saves your ass :)

Sidepoint: weither you believe it's FUD or not, it's a matter of fact that there is a real market here. A lot of medium to large companies are actually totally reluctant to put anything in the cloud. That's part of why you see github:fi, or the hoptoad firewalled version, or the ubuntu private cloud offer.

Another sidepoint: working with vaguely sensitive data at home on an encrypted disk is OK for me, but putting it into an EC2 instance: I would get fired and/or sued (not FUD here, I've been warned!).
Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?
A recent Erlang article in Communications of the ACM portrays Erlang as a specialized language for messaging/chat (Facebook chat, XMPP, etc.)and distributed storage (CouchDB, Riak, etc.)

I think this is probably right, but I'm wondering what else you've built in Erlang. Was it a good fit? Why or why not?
Maybe the red flag is constant reference to the product instead of the claim that some active substance effect is tested, but I admit I don't know how otherwise such articles are written. I have impression you're right.

Also see the comment of terrapinbear here, it's a "proprietary extract of the dried root of Astragalus membranaceus." and of tomwalker: "they want about $1000 a month."
> It's mostly boring, readable, well designed code that is maintainable. There's nothing sexy about that.

Quite the contrary: I wouldn't hire someone whose code isn't like that.
The Weak Link in Full-Disk Encryption (PDF)
Top Online Dating Site
I would prefer to see something of more substance, like a feature comparison table with other frameworks.
Nope. I use a company-provided Macbook and don't have much of anything on it that is of any particular value to me.
What about cancer? Does this increase the risk? It does seem like it would.
There are always way to hack a computer: but we're just asked to take reasonable steps toward making it harder.
Probably not. The US does not have the same statistical problems Japan does, but Japanese Americans live 2 years longer than Japanese.

http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...
You can use unique urls with ajax. Just use location.hash (url/#something).
I simply don't keep any information on my laptop hard drive. Everything valuable is at home or in the cloud. I assume that at any moment my laptop hard drive will crash or be stolen.
That depends on what you mean by "delayed". :)

They built the site in an incredibly short time span but they got started too late and it had way too many features to cram in to such a short development time of course leading to plenty of bugs at release time.

The entire company didn't exist for much longer than a year so they almost didn't even have time to be delayed before they were gone. :)

From Wikipedia:
"Boo.com's Swedish founders famously spent their way through £125 million ($188 million) in just six months."

Aaah, 1999. Those were the days. :)
wow, downvoted? i never graduated from high school, got Ph.D. at age 20...
I think it's more a matter of funding, which a GPU manufacturer provided. That this was shown to a crowd of what looks like high schoolers, that's a bit morally dubious, in my opinion.
Build a better chess rating system and enter your system into the following competition: http://kaggle.com/chess.

You may want to use machine learning techniques, which you can learn using the Andrew Ng's Stanford lectures (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&feature=chann...).
Today it's MapReduce but wait a few years...

09/11/2020: Google has found that its BigTable database is very limited in terms of the types of queries it can perform and that the kind of data modeling it enforces leads to a number of nasty inconsistencies. Under lead engineer Matt Codd, Google researchers have been working on a secret project codenamed 'Join' in order to remedy this situation. At this year's I/O conference the search behemoth will present the successor to its dated BigTable system. The new database system is rumored to be named DB2.
The food, I was really surprised by the quality of restaurants in Moscow last time I went there...
Office for Mac 2011 hits RTM
I definitely think even a brief period of thinking about a problem helps. Just seems to start the brain solving the problem subconciously :)
Just got back from school and switched my TV on out of boredom, and there it was.
It's interesting to realize that one could be holding a phone and using a fraction of its computational capacity because the two companies that collaborated on creating it... don't talk enough?
"As a startup enthusiast whose never learned how to code" seems to be the opposite of "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."
This headline is not wholly accurate. The relevant sentence is at the bottom of the first page:

"At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said the Internet played a significant role in divorces in the past year, with excessive interest in online porn contributing to more than half of such cases. "

So two-thirds of divorce lawyers say the Internet played a role, but porn was involved in "more than half" of those. The article is silent on how much more than half.
YouTube time machine
The Periodic Table of Videos
Making your development webserver publicly accessible using localtunnel
It's only FUD if you don't consider physical security at all important. When you're working with VERY sensitive data (the kind that mishandling could literally get you arrested for), you seek to secure it in every way possible.

Perhaps ironically, a white-listed firewall rule for a cluster of EC2 instances is probably more secure than most government networks, but putting it anywhere that compromises physical security is just as bad.
I do the same thing, but in GNU/Linux, using pwsafe for passwords and dm-crypt for disk encryption. IMO the one downside is that I have to remember to put stuff in the right place, e.g. moving dotfiles with sensitive data into the encrypted directory and creating a symlink back to ~.
for (2) you might want to checkout webmarker:

http://webmarker.me/

http://vimeo.com/10427062

a firefox addon that allows you to draw on top of web pages in a persistant manner.
Good article and I think you are doing some very interesting research.

My problem with this type of research though is the amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) it generates. Your attacks are viable if certain very precise conditions are in place i.e.:

[+] device has not been shut down for a period of time(you can probably advice what that is)
[+] the attacker knows and cares enough to try a cold boot attack and recover keys from the DRAM, and doesn't have any other easier options available to them to get the data
[+] they are able to take the memory out and store it in ultracool conditions
[+] the user has not applied another level of encryption on top for really sensitive files e.g. PGP file / email encryption

I mean if I was the US, Chinese, Russian governments or organized crime and wanted something on someone's laptop I would just kidnap them or hold their family hostage and ask for the password. Although Truecrypt hidden operating system was designed as some mitigation to this type of attack
Management Consulting Myths
Why One Critical Flaw Will Stop Apple Ping From Hugely Increasing Sales
While I lived there, the police did something similar -- seized computers, copied confidential emails, returned the computers half a year later -- to a support group for women raped by the police. I'd laugh at the irony if it weren't so awful.

That's just how Russia is.
Getting rejected
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1682323
And then the police will take you down to the station and you'll fall down a flight of stairs until you kindly give up your password. There are no technological solutions to a lack of civil rights.
Heroku @ startup bootcamp 2010
Northcentral University does an online PhD in CS for 27k GBP. You could also talk to folks at Open University. They have a wide range of MPhil and PhD interests and might advise you.
And yes, you can do a PhD and work at the same time. Depends what motivates you and makes you happy. If you cannot wait to be productive and find things out, the sky is the limit.
Just watch out for burn out...
Its not that I don't consider physical security as important - I just do not think that the physical security provided by your private data centre is any better than what Amazon provides. The economies of scale and the motivation to avoid a massive security incident that affects all their customers is just greater than what you have with internal IT.

But of course do a risk assessment, maybe military data should not be on any sort of cloud. But I know internal government and military security is actually pretty poor - funnily enough generals care more making sure their comms work to their soldiers than whether it is encrypted - sound kind of like a business eh?

Either way I predict that within 5 years, private clouds will be a thing of the past
As an interviewer, if I ask for code it's for three reasons. I want to know:

a. ... that you can write code.

b. ... what your code looks like, to see your style.

c. ... how well your taste and judgement aligns with mine in the question of "good code".

I wouldn't want much, I wouldn't want anything world-shattering, I just want to see some code you think is clean and effective.

But that's me.
Cool new website for cycling freaks: Cycle EXIF
It would be much easier for them to have a stacked deck at the ready, and just swap it out for the deck in play.
No that is not accurate - Russia is no more dangerous to tourists than many other countries.

It is only when you start having money that it becomes dangerous.
Thanks for that. 27k still a decent chunk of money - wonder what my return on investment will be for that.

Think its going to stay on my someday list for now, who knows if by software as a service business does well I can focus on a PHD full time while the money still keeps coming in
Highly educated populace. Good mathematicians and engineers. Generally nice people. Rich cultural history. A pride in their culture and in being Russian that Americans don't, in my experience, have (disregarding our jingoistic biblethumpers). Tall skinny blonds if that's your thing. A more relaxed culture in terms of laws and rules than the US. Excellent, if heavy, food. Better public transport, at least in Moscow, than anywhere in the US.
Don't ever do this. Just a few reasons...

1. You say "during the application process". Have you even met the hiring manager at this point? Worse yet, have you met anyone or are you just stuck in some automated process? Never forget that employment application is a two way street; you're evaluating them as much as they're evaluating you. They haven't earned the right to see your code yet.

2. This approach should be a red flag to any applicant. They want to see old code to evaluate you when they are 64 betters ways to do that? Something's fishy here - someone has no idea what they're doing.

3. Do not allow anyone to read your code out of context. You need to be there to explain the background, motivation, approach, and answer any questions. Cutting and pasting preempts yourself. Bring hard copy along only after the process has progressed far enough.

4. Only bad things can happen. This is like being the first the mention a number - you can't win. If someone wanted to hook up with you but asked for a dirty underwear sample first, would you give one? This is the same thing.

5. If your code is proprietary, who knows where it could end up? You may also be violating confidentiality agreements. Not worth it.

6. The employer-employee relationship is a never ending tension. You will always be "negotiating" money and working conditions, whether you realize it or not. Giving in to such an unreasonable request so early in your relationship marks you as a chump. You may never recover the equal footing you need (and deserve) in the ongoing relationship.

7. If they have a problem, move on. You're probably saving yourself a lot of trouble down the road.

You sound like a competent developer who should have no trouble finding a job without bending over. So don't.

[Aside: Because of this kind of thinking, I never give references before being hired. In essence, I'm telling the prospective employer, "You decide." They then have the right to rescind the offer if they don't like a reference.]
All very good points, and convincingly presented. But I don't think anybody (nobody here, at least) is contesting that politeness is important and useful in social interactions.

The question was whether being polite or brusque (and he wasn't rude after all, just perfunctory and not actively polite) in refusing to answer CBP officers' questions would have made much of a difference to the CBP response.
This may sound like a silly question, but when using two images, why not just correct the under/overexposed bits. That is, you have two images, im_over and im_under and you substitute all pixels with pure white in im_over with pixels from im_under and all pure black pixels from im_under with pixels from im_over, and take the average of both images in all other pixels?
Why not also throw in libc as well and say it's been over multiple decades?
Thank you, I will check these books. And I also bookmarked your posterous, nice to know a gui developer =)
Truecrypt is awesome, great performance (especially if it can use your hardware is compatible with its optimization) and free. Really easy to use and supports come cool features like a hidden operating system (for if you get held and gun point and asked for your password)

You can also configure Truecrypt to work with multiboot - so if you have Ubuntu, Chromium OS and Windows 7 for example it will still work
The dual monitors makes you more productive, would be a good one.
Hacker News Instant Search
Ask HN: How do you manage your wealth/savings?
What tools/methods do you use to keep track of your wealth? By that I mean savings accounts, shares perhaps, investments etc. Mint is good (in the US at least) for everyday expenses, but is there something for more longterm stuff?
I hardly ever use the Google homepage to search anyway, I always use the address bar in Chrome so this new feature is largely irrelevant to me.
I'm not sure 4 is in the right order, considering you didn't name anyone/anything. I would put kernel dev's above framework devs. 0 and 1 are equal in my mind. Basically you should be able to give names for up to your #8 if you can't name person/company/project it should probably be lower.

I would order 0 1 (etc), 2, 3, 5, 8, 4, 7, 9, 10 11, 12, 13, 14 (comma placement is explicit where I find those levels equivalent)
You are free to produce the substance. If you produce it, it is your property. You own it. You may choose to keep it, or you may choose to trade it for someone else's property. You may ask a billion dollars per gram if you like. No one may force you to trade your property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it.

I am free to produce the substance. If I produce it, it is my property. I own it. I may choose to keep it, or I may choose to trade it for someone else's property. I may ask twenty thousand dollars per gram if I like. No one may force me to trade my property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it.

Et cetera, et cetera. Apply that same formula equally to each living being in the universe, and you have my view on the matter.

Also, no subsidies. A subsidy involves the taking of an individual's property by force, which is morally wrong.
And jumps between systems... lots of them.
You can just enter the url of the Craigslist post at the end of your mail.
This is the best one yet - I can actually see myself using this. It's hard to know what terms people have used on HN when searching for something. The Ask HN archives are a brilliant resource.
Is there a significant style difference between using Gimp and Photoshop? I only know Photoshop, but I've always thought of Gimp as just program for doing basically the same work. I wouldn't think there'd be a difference in the final product.
As much math and foreign languages as you can manage. Make sure that you achieve real competence in one of the languages.

"He ... believed a competent person primarily has the ability to take things from one field of knowledge and apply them to others in creative ways." Well, he's right. But you have to have the information to work with.

By the way, lot of philosophy majors discover that they don't want to be in academia (or do, but can't get tenure) and that computing not only requires an ability for abstract thinking but rewards it well.
A duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649860
1. Do something that you love
2. Do something you will excel at.
brand value has a BIG importance in the US. you are basically buying your way into a separate class of opportunities.

Also the opportunity cost of getting a branded/respected degree is MUCH lower now than in say 20 years from now. You are buying a safety net.

also the fact that most "marketing" majors know squat about practical marketing is irrelevant, most students lack the ambition and foresight to break beyond their major of study. you're showing us now through this thread you're thinking ahead.

no one will be more impressed if you have a self-named degree over being a marketing major, but proving yourself an expert in web marketing analytics (which you become on your own, and build up your brand).
Yes, but that's exactly why it's important to realize this only gives you some protection. The OP asked for his personal needs, not because of some company policy, which means he/she should know whether it really is effective.
I do the same (happy 50GB Dropbox user).

I haven't researched this, but is it possible to remotely delete a Dropbox drive? I.e. if my laptop is stolen, to use the site to wipe the data from the laptop? I assume it's possible.
Sounds like you are an entrepreneur that would look to launch or be part of a start-up so it begs the question: why go to college at all?

If it is just for the contacts and a piece of paper just do a the shortest business or engineering course you can and do it online via something like Open University so that you can focus on building some business ideas or working for a startup. Try get an internship or voluntarily role at Google or Facebook, Twitter etc - what you will learn there and the contacts you will get will be invaluable, even if you work on the business rather than technical side.

3-5 years of college and grad school will be an absolute waste of time for you. You don't actually learn anything in college of use, you hopefully just learn how to learn but you can do this on your own time for cheaper. Also the contacts but there are better ways of getting a good network together. When I hire or interview someone I only look at their experience, especially any side and personal projects they have, I relay don't care what they studied or what college they went to. MBA's are even more of a waste of time and money

Just don't do a finance course and become a banker: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/07/turning-bankers-to-engine...
Yeah, I think so – but don't know for sure.
I don't think anyone expects the lock to thwart a dedicated attacker. But the most common case of laptop stealing is someone wanting a new laptop, not your specifically. Your laptop just has to look harder to steal.
I'll add mine:

3) I can no longer use command-enter to put the new search results in a new tab.

4) Sometimes it lets my type out a modification to my search but then reverts back to the old one.

5) Closing the tab/window search results still trips the alert for unsent form data.

So far, the only way I've found is to turn it off is to disable javascript when searching.
Supposed to be a good exposition, although not entirely easy; for modern editions you can buy:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Masterpiece...

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Classic-Rep...
I built a very specialized mail server (MTA).

It was a tedious, frustrating experience, even though you'd think it would be the perfect language.

It ended up being too slow (probably because of all the string processing)

In my entire programming career, I've never before had to join a mailing list and ask questions to get things done, that should tell you something.
Update to v0.2 just went live

Major features:
- Intelligent zoom
- More efficient API usage
- Markers clear with new searches