skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks to work efficiently with even very short texts, but I'm afraid we'll get banned pretty soon by Goog : we'll have lots and lots of very short text, so we'll need to invoke the API a lot... (with the aforementioned ban outcome, we fear :(
Actually, I just wish that US banks would get up to speed with the Chip & PIN thing Europe has been doing since the '90s.

Every time I buy groceries here in England, I get grief about my ancient relic of a Visa card that doesn't even have a chip on it, and thus requires swiping through a reader like the cavemen used to do and then signing a piece of paper.

About every 3rd visit, I get to have a manager called over and explain that I come from a primitive country where the banks still do things the old way.

It's embarrassing.
Yes, in theory. In practice it can be very hard to include switching costs, complexity costs etc into the equation. Most business people I know take a much more pragmatic view of calculating ROI on direct costs and putting a finger in the air about whether it's worthwhile.

Also, if total return is small and capped, it may not even be worth the time to calculate ROI.
Bleh. I hate to see all this new tech trying to drag the credit card infrastructure into the 21st century.

The way credit cards work is exactly wrong— to make a purchase, I have to hand over every single piece of information the merchant needs to convince my bank to give them money. Then they ask the bank for as much money as they want. My bank will /maybe/, in extreme cases, double check with me if I actually want to give it to them.

Now that smartphones are everywhere, we finally have the tech to implement electronic payments the way they should be— where the merchant provides me with /their/ id, and then /I/ tell my bank to make a payment.

But no, not today. "Card 2.0" makes my financial information more secure right up until the moment I swipe it, at which point it's just as stupid and broken as classic credit cards. Not intending any offense towards the founders, but I hope the era of your tech is short-lived.
Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
Yeah, a reference to an external file would be a better way to do it. And HTML5 already has the mechanism for this sort of thing: the <link> element[1] and the "rel extensions" registry.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

[2] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/RelExtensions
I write very few comments. When I do write a comment, I always do the top-right corner check when I come back. To me, its validation that my opinion was well taken by the community (a community that I respect).

I'm going to try to avoid that this time :)
“Orakio -> #programming: I mean I hate scientology and I don’t need to be in some group called anonymous to express that hate.” – zf04

Same can apply with anti-piracy. Anonymous = noobs.
First of all, the video you're talking about wasn't a timing attack.

Microseconds over the Internet. Nanoseconds on private networks. Here are some grandstanding security researchers demonstrating this at this year's Black Hat:

http://rdist.root.org/2010/07/19/exploiting-remote-timing-at...

Note: I don't think they were even using signal processing techniques, which is what the academic results used.

Since you don't even know what's being timed here, and the evidence you're collecting to support your argument is two back-to-back reloads of Hacker News, I'm not sure where you get off writing "classic white room scenario". But then, the last thread you commented on, you said "This exploit has remarkably little applicability to the vast majority of ASP.NET applications". Then Bruce told you they used it to get SYSTEM on a remote Sharepoint install.
> the entire point of interacting with other people is to learn.

I find the short/shallow discussions on HN very good for this. They give you just a couple of shots to either pose an insightful question or provide an insightful response, which encourages high signal content and enforces a "get to the point" mentality. From discussions elsewhere, I've found the majority of learning comes within those first few serious posts; by the time a single person has posted 5-6 times it's often either repetitive or off-topic. In my experience, it's extremely rare for people to still be providing new insight after 5+ rounds of back and forth.

That said, in those rare circumstances, I would like to continue discussions further than HN allows (that's one reason I list my e-mail address in my profile.) I've found that what kills deep discussion on HN is not the lack of deep nesting, but the fast news cycle and lack of a "refresh" mechanic to bring threads with new posts back to the top. If someone responds to a discussion I started 2 days ago, I may never see their response.
Also Sean Hannity's forum, but for some reason nobody noticed that. (it's back up now)
> The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be worthwhile for them in their everyday life.

Make knowledge acquisition both a) fun and b) timely. Add a motivating situation that leads people to want/need to learn, and they will.
Well I can empathize with the author. I too feel almost everything of importance that I've ever accomplished intellectually or mathematically, however modest, emerged as the result of intense collaboration with colleagues, complete with rigorous arguments. We would often change sides solely to get a burst of new energy when stuck in the same old thoughts. It's how research is done.

I also begin a lot of comments that I don't publish (please give the karma to swah below for saying it first :), as writing is a skill you have to work at. I don't consider myself a lurker, as my low karma might indicate given I've been here 1306 days, but mostly I scan and occasionally read in depth and try to jump in when I can add value or correct obvious mistakes. In terms of interests it's surprising how diverse this community is. Even with lots of programmers one wouldn't expect to find so many familiar with category theory.

I've seen HN change, often not for the better, and I'm reminded of Shirky's essay on a group being it's own worst enemy, but I've watched this puppy grow for a long time so I'm staying. Besides, I haven't owned a TV in 20 years now and I miss the Saturday morning cartoons. HN fills that gap.
Agree strongly with this, for what it's worth. It also perpetuates an obnoxious myth about hiding side channels (see above thread).
No, if you innocently view a page on an underpowered server, you are not part of a denial of service attack and are, by definition, innocent. A Denial of Service attack is explicitly malicious.
Looxcie Wearable Camcorder
I see this story about every 3 years. For a few seconds I think "wouldn't that be awesome." Then I realize that a modern C64 (or Amiga) will never be as good as my childhood memories. In fact, modernizing it would probably destroy it for me. Let me keep the memories of notching 5.25"s, BBSs, and LOAD "*",8,1
Samsung Guru E2152 Dual SIM Mobile Price @ Rs. 3550 Launched in India
Samsung Electronics, a leading mobile phone provider, strengthened its Guru series of essential mobile handsets with the launch of Samsung Guru Dual Sim (E 2152). The new handset combines in itself the user friendly features of the Guru series and provides users with features such as – Dual SIM Standby, longer battery life and Wireless FM radio with recording.
>>> If I understand the exploit correctly, attackers are able to make
>>> a series of bad requests, record the error page display timing,
>>> and eventually figure out the machine key used for AES encryption.

Yes.

>>> I don't use ViewState any more, having moved on to ASP.NET MVC

(From my inherently limited understanding) this is not just ViewState. That's just one of the multiple things vulnerable. I think they also mentioned ASP.NET MVC being vulnerable, too.
I mostly work from home (and I live in the mountains 2.5 hours from a large airport) so I would like high quality video conferencing with shared whiteboards, etc.

Right now I use video mostly for talking to remote family members, but a high quality telepresence to "be in" a remote conference room would be great.
The context that this article misses is that PDF is a huge spec. It is much bigger than you think it is. Adobe maintains the reference implementation. How many image formats do they have to maintain? How many compression schemes?

It is not as if Adobe can simply set a new code standard and fix all that old code instantly.

Adobe's legacy code problem with PDF's is worse than Microsoft's; Adobe has to maintain some of this gross old stuff for all time.
You keep modifying your posts to always set it such that you've "pre-rebutted" what I later say, so this thread is futile.
A Day In The Life Of A Tibetan Monk
definitely i'm gonna try your lib.
This article is attention-seeking flame-bait disguised as a thoughtful analysis of why HN is no longer worthy of his attention.

Him: "Baby, I love you but you're so self-destructive"
HN: "No, don't go - I promise we'll change and be better for you"

I don't buy it. Why make a stink about it? Why not just leave quietly?
This isn't a timing attack. It's an attack that, even if you adopt Microsoft's workarounds, can be exploited in a timing variant. Thai didn't demonstrate that variant.

I can't make any sense of the rest of your comment.
PG tried hiding the karma for every comment a year or so back, but that made it harder to to skim pages looking for insightful comments.

Something that could reduce the game-like unpredictable reward aspect of karma scanning might be to delay updating it, perhaps only once a day. But then you might fall back to checking 'threads'.

Perhaps only hide karma score from your own comments made more recently than a day?
HD movies are not the first thing I thought of. Those are mostly cracked by bypassing AACS (and sometimes BD+) encryption, which is already possible. This new attack allows sniffing of protected live or streaming content, like Netflix or video game content. Imagine bitstream rips of audio from exclusive Guitar Hero DLC.
this is pretty cool too, i'm gonna try it.
Digital sound was invented in 1937 decades before the technology to use it
There are many cool things one could do with this, but I'm afraid the most popular one is going to be homemade porn.
Calm, I didn't mean no config file.

But any file with sensitive information should be stored in a safe directory (not the root, for example) and with strict permissions. Also any sensitive data within that file should be protected if possible. This applies to any remotely accessed application, of course.

Also, how does a process working with remote clients have full access to a sensible file like that? Aren't there ACL features or something like that that can block that access? (No sarcasm meant.)
Ten unlikely ideas that changed the world
My bet is that most of the people on their site are non-technical. There is nothing wrong with that, but it always seems like there are way more non-technical cofounder candidates that technical cofounder candidates. I've always wanted to work with a cofounder who is way more technical than I am, but I usually end up with junior developers in the projects I do. What are your opinions on how the starting team's skillset?
I notice that the cards consume electricity. I wonder how long the battery lasts, and how they're replaced. Furthermore, there's the whole pressing against your card, and looking at the actual pressing action, it looks like you have to press them pretty hard (or maybe he just was). How durable is the card, really?
The real mistakes of the space shuttle program
A reasonable point of view, but I would suggest simply setting rough limits like "I am going to spend about 20 minutes today reading tech news."

Way off topic, but: I think the article was too long. This is a trick I learned a long time ago: usually when I write an email or a blog post I let it sit for a while, then try to shorten it. Other people's time is as precious as our own so the effort in shrinking material down for quick digestion is worthwhile.
It is always delightful to me when people look more closely at well-understood pathways and make new discoveries that change our understanding. This is one such occasion.

Basically, it appears that they discovered a feed-forward loop in the synthesis of phosphoenolpyruvate, the penultimate product of glycolysis. Though this wasn't mentioned in the news article, I wonder if this helps to explain the Warburg effect.

Anyways, this doesn't exactly jump out to me with applications since the research seems so early stage. True, discovery of novel pathways implies that inhibition of these pathways could be useful for treating cancer. But until some research is actually done in that vein, I'm hesitant to read too deeply. I'll review the manuscript itself, but I don't think we know for sure that this "cancer-only" pathway is not at play in important, rapidly-growing non-cancerous tissues, which would be my main concern.
Maybe. But the Asian languages all tend to be displayed left-to-right on the web. I've only seen Arabic (or Farsi?) script written right-to-left online.
Check this out:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/teaching/6470/spri...

Did you know Wikipedia doesn't function as a democracy? I believe the stats are something like top 20 % influence 80% of articles. If HN were to be proper democracy, I think it's decline would be hastened a.k.a -"Every community deteriorates over time"

Aging in online communities happens way faster than real life-but it 's psychology is basically the same -"What does this Twenty-something CEO know to tell us 15 year industry veterans something of value?"
Yes, but it's rare seeing it used in the media as we use it outside the media.
No need to sign your name. We can tell it's you from the username. See the comments section of the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can you establish that these are the exact same people? It's only hypocrisy if you can establish that. Otherwise you've merely observed in a relatively hostile way that various people have various ideas about "freedom" and that's neither news nor terribly interesting on its own.
New Sprred Theme released - Minimalist
You can forget about IE most of the time, but Safari and other version of FireFox makes it kinda hard. Good start and hope to see improvements...
That's odd. I never have to horizontally scroll comments in my Android browser.
Interesting idea and I hope it works out.

The problem I see is that you can't exactly apply the online dating model to finding a co-founder. With online dating, you presumably date a number of people before finding someone acceptable/awesome. Sometimes it takes multiple dates to figure things out for sure.

But for a start-up founder, you can't go start multiple companies just to be sure they are the one. You need a level of trust and an ability to work together that you just can't get from a couple of lunch meetings.

I do hope they can prove me wrong though, because that would be awesome.
The 6510 (C64 6502 with extra ports) has secret opcodes, basically holes in the circuitry, which emulators have to support because they're used in demos for extra speed (eg, write to x what's in a).

I wonder if this simulation also has secret opcodes?
we had efnet, they have 4chan

kids will be kids
Banks in the US do issue such cards, and in NYC at least I see them used. Are you certain that your bank does not?
Sorry. I'm a bit defensive about this, given the crazy people running around saying "see, all you have to do is turn on customErrors to fix this flaw".
Civil disobedience has a long and recognized history and plays an important role in democratic societies as much as any other kind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

It very well could indicate a flaw in democracy, nothing is perfect.
Well, the underlying question is whether simple scripting is (in your analogy) closer to "mechanics" or to "driver's license education".

I think you're right that at the moment it's more than what almost all everyday users need, but the trend is definitely towards it being something that most people could learn/would benefit greatly from learning. So then the problem is identifying when that transition happens; perhaps it's already happening in some fields such as the one described in the article.
Live-upgrades to IRCCloud.com with Erlang/OTP
Uh, doesn't that just add an extra round trip and yet another mandatory HTTP request? No thanks, I think we've enough of those.
A professor at my medical school likes to say that, "The entire world is covered in a thin fecal veneer."
Isn't SACD uncrackable so far?
Nice idea, could use a lot of improvement though... Some initial feedback (as I'm attempting to fill out a profile):

Personality
Which profile is most like you?

- Vision/strategy: see 1-2 years ahead, predict trends, write vision document, and inspire a team

- Implementation/execution: build a product, follow a great plan, detail-oriented, manage daily operations

I'd be nice if those were checkboxes, it's perfectly reasonable for a person to embody all of those personality traits. In general it would be nice if there was more flexibility in the profile.
What about non-random sleeps? If I try to peg all error responses as closely as possible to one second using hi-resolution timers and the obvious subtraction?

I ask this more out of academic curiosity than a burning desire to go implement it. (I'm not on .Net anyhow.)
I think that there is something wrong with that. I have found that business co-founders are a dime a dozen but tech co-founders are extremely hard to find and in high demand. Oddly enough this creates the same situation that you find on traditional dating sites (e.g.: too many men not enough women). But even with that said. It seems like a cool idea and I hope they do well.
Indeed. I've left HN forever at least six times, and you don't see me making a big fuss about it.
Would you be OK with resizing? App Engine has a 1MB limit, and I could get around that by splitting the file on the client, but I could also just do a resize in JS with canvas/ImageData.
Ask HN: Review my Twilio based startup
I have opened to the public a tool I've been using for nearly a year now: phone number redirection on my pay-and-talk phone. I wanted better rates than what the telecom was willing to give me, without a contract, and so I used Twilio to make this. Please let me know what you think, about any part of it. It can be found here: http://churp.me/
I would buy Office for Linux. Hands down. Full price. Don't lock me into a crappy OS to get your products I do like.

Also, take serious advantage of Apple v Google and do some real innovation in the OS area. Make me love Windows 8 more than Linux. You have an opportunity.

Finally, make a next generation platform for mobile that's more than a lame copy of your crappy OS for the desktop. Inject some real competition into the handset market.
Unlike your XKCD example, a community's early members are not talking about the general population. They're talking about a special interest community's dilution.

Few communities are begun by the average, they're begun by the inspired, impassioned, or invested. The founders are focused. Motivated, they cross a barrier of inaction, pouring in resources and effort, establishing a meeting place for clear like minds.

Latecomers are on the whole less missioned. The barrier to joining is less than the barrier to beginning. Growth and time inexorably pull participatory discussion away from the founding focus toward the bell curve's center.
No, I'm saying exactly what I said.
Anyone else think this is a pretty good metaphor for a startup?
Dude, it's an amazing job you're doing on this ASP.NET discussion. Keep it up.
96? do you mean 2006 or am I missing part of the widget?
The biggest source of credit card fraud is that there's no standard way of proving that someone is in physical possession of the card.

Online transactions only require CC#/Exp/CV2 name/address etc which are stored on merchant machines and then compromised and released to the while.

A much more secure option would be to have CCs with built-in RSA key gen. Stealing the CC#s would no longer be enough to make a fraudulent transaction.
It was only natural that the community's interests would broaden and lose focus. There was certainly a more strict focus prior to 5-6 months ago and definitely 4 years ago, however, HN was never strictly startup only news. In the initial stages it was heavily weighted towards startup news, but the focus was still more diffuse than say /r/startups.

http://www.reddit.com/r/startups

This is where the superiority of a site designed to offer something for everyone without foisting a mould on everyone becomes obvious. Reddit allows the targeted streaming of topic consistent information. Hacker News attempts to be an aggregate approximation of multiple streams that interest hacker mindsets. Alternatively, Facebook is good if you're looking for organized boredom in a curated garden that will spill your information like a dribble cup.
While the paper cited by 'StavrosK is indeed a very important one in computer vision (it's the basis for almost all modern face detection algorithms), it's not the one most relevant for Shazam.

I don't know the details of what they're doing, but most likely they are using something related to SIFT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...

This is another seminal work in computer vision, which solves both problems that 'StavrosK mentioned:

1. Find candidate feature points that stand out, and are reliably and repeatedly
detectable despite image variations.
2. Get a "hash" of each point that can be used to do searches fairly quickly.

Lots of work in detecting and recognizing objects now uses some variant of SIFT, and it's finding usage in lots of other areas of vision as well. I wouldn't be surprised if as many as 10% of papers at the top vision conferences use techniques based on some variant of SIFT.
> Uh, doesn't that just add an extra round trip and yet another mandatory HTTP request?

No. The request only happens if you decide to "pin" the site, or otherwise give it a first-class status on your machine (one could imagine the same by pining it to the OSX dock or making a site into a "standalone app", I think there was a browser doing that a while ago)
I think UK was also the last in Europe to use chips on the cards, which, as far as I know, are the French invention. I remember using their specialized cards with chips there twenty years ago only to make some phone calls.

By the way a lot of elementary security issues with cards are there because all the mechanisms still have to allow Americans to use their magnetic stripes, allowing simple tricks with them that would otherwise not be possible. On another side, chips are no silver bullet when it comes to the security. There are a lot of possible attacks, just some specific set of them would be excluded by only having chips. So no matter how it's popular among the geeks, the real-life solutions to real life problems are not purely technological and probably will never be.

Still, as I live in Europe, I'd personally like to have the cards without the magnetic strip.
Irony: it is articles like this that keep me coming back to HN.